Killing the Spirit, Keeping the Spirit

They took away everything except the spirit, which they were incapable of seeing.

~Julia Esquivel, You Can’t Drown the Fire, 197

A people’s spirit can be wounded, dishonored, and diminished.  Their land can be stolen, their leaders killed, their people enslaved, their children starved.  Remembering the spirit of their people’s resistance they will, nevertheless, endure.  The most dangerous and insidious tactic of the colonizer is the attempt to destroy the people’s spirit.  Such a strategy aims a weapon at the people’s culture, attempting to “adapt” that culture to the “civilized” culture by negating the culture of the colonized.  This leads to self-hatred on the part of children who grow up in the shadows of the hated (or feared) subjugating culture.  This strategy also reinforces in the colonizer’s descendants a legacy of moral superiority, which, because it is a lie, is morally corrosive.

Consider, for example, the damage to the Indian spirit, as well as the moral character of Americans, to have U.S. government policies state an objective of cultural destruction of Indian nations.  After the buffalo were killed off the Great Plains, after wild horses no longer ran the open range, and after red people of this land were penned into reservations, the white fathers in Washington made policies to win the final war against the Indians.  This was the cultural war; the weapon used was law and policy.  The objective of U.S. Indian policy was to deny Native American cultural identity.  Psychologists insist that the failure to know who you are leads to madness, suicide, or violent rage.  It is psychic death.  Yet this was Indian policy.  Here is an extract from the Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1889.  “The logic of events demands the absorption of citizens….The Indians must conform to ‘the white man’s ways,’ peaceably if they will, forcibly if they must….They cannot escape it and must conform to it or be crushed by it” (Prucha, ed., 177)

Indian Commissioner Morgan then goes on to identify the essence of U.S. “civilization” and the Indian cultural practices which presented obstacles to their enculturation.  “The tribal relations should be broken up, socialism destroyed, and the family and autonomy of the individual substituted.  The allotment of lands in severalty, the establishment of local courts and police, the development of person sense of independence, and the universal adoption of the English language are the means to this end” (Prucha, ed., 177).

The excerpt below from the Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior also identifies the Indian cultural values of community and non ownership of sacred land as obstacles to their civilization.  “The value of property as an agent of civilization ought not to be overlooked.  When an Indian acquires property…he has made a step forward in the road to civilization” (Prucha, ed., 161).

The clash of cultures centers on the property right and individualism of the white way and the communal and non acquisitive values of the Indian.  Identifying individualism and private property as civilization not only destroys Indian culture but exposes the spiritual bankruptcy of white mainstream culture.  The most morally damaging aspect of U.S. Indian policy for the “civilized” citizens of the United States was and is presented as a moral effort much the way modern wars against “communist” or “terrorist” nations are fought in the name of God to save civilizations from the new “savages.”  The forms of “morality” used to justify destruction of Indian culture can be overtly racist or sympathetic, as the next two government documents illustrate.  Whether the conservatives or the liberals decided Indian policy, the result was still the same: reservations, broken treaties, the banning of Indian language and rituals in the reservation schools: in short, cultural destruction.  Indian Commissioner Price recommended a policy that would solve the “Indian Problem” in 1881:

To domesticate and civilize wild Indians is a noble work, the accomplishment of which should be a crown of glory to any nation.  But to allow them to drag along year after year, and generation after generation, in their old superstitions, laziness, and filth, when we have the power to elevate them in the scale of humanity, would be a lasting disgrace of our government…savage and civilized life cannot prosper on the same ground.  One of the two must die.  If the Indians are to be civilized…they must learn our language and adopt our modes of life.  We are fifty millions of people, and they are only one fourth of a million.  The few must yield to the many.

~From the Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, October 24, 1881, in Francis Paul Prucha, ed., Documents of United States Indian Policy, 156

Is the more sympathetic “liberal” approach of Indian Commissioner Walker, which follows, much different in practice from Commissioner Price’s harsh tone?

Had the settlements of the United States not been extended beyond the frontier of 1867, all the Indians of the continent would to the end of time have found upon the plains an inexhaustible supply of food and clothing.  Were the westward course of population to be stayed at the barriers of today…the Indians would still have hope of life.

The freedom of expansion which is working these results is to us of incalculable value.   To the Indian it is of incalculable cost.  Every year’s advantage of our frontier takes in a territory as large as some of the kingdoms of Europe.  We are richer by hundreds of millions; the Indian is poorer by a large part of the little he has.  This growth if bringing imperial greatness to the nation; to the Indian it brings wretchedness, destitution, beggary….

Can any principle of national morality be clearer than that, when the expansion of development of a civilized race involves the rapid destruction of the only means of subsistence possessed by the members of a less fortunate race, the higher is bound as of simple right to provide for the lower some substitute for the means of subsistence which it has destroyed?  That substitute is, of course, best realized, not by systematic gratuities of food and clothing continued beyond a present emergency, but by directing these people to new pursuits which shall be consistent with the progress of civilization upon the continent, helping them over the first rough places on the
white man’s road.”

~ Commissioner Walker, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, in Francis Paul Prucha, ed., Documents of United States Indian Policy, 137

Indian Policy and the Black Hills

Our ideas will overcome your ideas.  We are going to cut the country’s whole value system to shreds.  It isn’t important that there are only 500,000 of us Indians….What is important is that we have a superior way of life.  We Indians have a more human philosophy of life.  We Indians will show this country how to act human.  Someday this country will revise its constitution, its laws, in terms of human beings, instead of property.  If Red Power is to be a power in this country it is because it is ideological….What is the ultimate value of a man’s life?  That is the question.

~Vine Deloria, Jr., In Touch the Earth, 159 

It’s no wonder that the Indian cannot understand the white way or that native people have come to assume that whites are only capable of cultural theft of art, medicine, and ideas, of human labor and of land.  Sitting Bull articulated the cultural clash of worldviews and the resulting tragedy for the Sioux nation which defended the Indian way:

What treaty that the whites have kept has the red man broken?  Not one.  What treaty that the white man ever made with us has the white man ever kept?  Not one.  When I was a boy the Sioux owned the world; the sun rose and set on their land, they sent ten thousand men to battle.  Where are the warriors today?  Who slew them?  Where are our lands?  Who owns them?  What white man can say I ever stole his land or a penny of his money?  Yet they say I am a thief.  What white woman, however lonely, was ever captive or insulted by me?  Yet they say I am a bad Indian.  What white man has ever seen me drunk?  Who has ever come to me hungry and unfed?  Who has ever seen me beat my wives or abuse my children?  What law have I broken?  Is it wrong for me to love my own?  Is it wicked for me because my skin is red?  Because I am Lakota, because I was born where my father died, because I would die for my people and country?

~Quoted in Peter Matheissen, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, 33

And now, five hundred years later, the colonizers still seek treasure.  Today treasure is not gold, but uranium; Indians within the United States are not reduced to slaves, but leaders are criminalized and imprisoned.  Law is able to accomplish what the whip and sword accomplished in the time of Columbus.  Just as Chief Guaironex and Sitting Bull cherished the land, Lakota leader Russell Means fights for the Black Hills today:

Right now, today, we who live on the Pine Ridge Reservation are 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 and 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 the white society that created th is industry, to be an “acceptable” price to pay for energy resource development.  Along the way they also plan to drain the water table under this part of South Dakota as part of the industrial process, so the region becomes doubly uninhabitable.  This same sort of thing is happening down in the land of the Navajo and the Hope, up in the northern Cheyenne and Crow, and elsewhere….

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 the uranium here and drain the water table, no more, no less.

~Quoted in Peter Mattheissen, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, 525

It’s sadly ironic that the clash between the red and white vision is symbolized today in the Black Hills, the sacred land of the Great Sioux nation.  A legal fight rages over the 1868 Sioux claim to South Dakota lands, including seven and a half million acres of the Black Hills that were “lost” when Congress nullified the 1868 treaty following Custer’s defeat.  In the 1980s when the Sioux appealed to the Supreme Court, the government’s “right” to the land was upheld.  But the Sioux nation, faithful to tribal ethics and believing the earth is sacred and not for sale, refused the money.

The Black Hills is the land where the U.S. government chose to symbolize its democratic achievement. Chiseled into the stone hills of South Dakota are the faces of Presidents Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, and Theodore Roosevelt.  The government of the United States seeks to renovate the Mt. Rushmore National Memorial in South Dakota—“a shrine of democracy,” according to President Bush.  The Sioux nation protests!  “Not only did they desecrate our sacred land,” said Tim Giago, an Oglala Sioux who is editor of the Lakota Times, “they also memorialized four Presidents who committed acts of atrocity against our people…They want to spend $40 million to repair Mr. Rushmore and it’s 70 miles from the poorest country in American, where our people are destitute (Chu and Shaw, 69-70).

Destitute indeed!  The annual income in the area is twenty-four hundred dollars, with an unemployment rate of eighty-five percent (Chu and Shaw, 70).  Impoverished and defiant, the Sioux will not accept money for the sacred.  Who is spiritually destitute, spiritually alive?  If the lands of the Americas are to be saved from destruction, it is the Indians of America, who by their faithful reverence for the living world will save it.  This sacred love of all beings is the profound spiritually that has enabled Indian people to continue to resist five hundred years of assault and degradation.  Indian spirituality is the hidden cultural weapon that sustains resistance in the face of hardship and death.  Penned in reservations, marginalized, made invisible, the red nations refuse to die. 

Five hundred years after the conquest of the Americas, an environmental crisis confronts the world.  Scientists predict that the destruction of the rainforest, industrial pollution, acid rain, nuclear radiation, and destruction of animal species has so altered the environment that the earth itself is in mortal danger.  Some of the Indian medicine people echo the Indian prophecy which foretells apocalyptic destruction as a result of the whites’ failure to respect the mother, Earth.  Lakota Wallace Black Elk articulates that vision:

The white people have to surrender their arms to the great Spirit.

This purification is coming real soon, and all the guns and gold will melt.  The holy spirit, the atom, the power of god, will melt those guns and tanks and poison gasses they create….They will be standing by themselves….When the time comes there won’t be no amnesty.

We’re going back to the beginning of time…I have no  fear, I have no slightest fear whatsoever.  Even if I have to face death like Chief Big Foot, it’s very beautiful.

We hold the key to eternity, where it is beautiful and it is everlasting for everyone.  That’s where we’re going.  We’re going home.  And finally we will be back in the Great Spirit’s hands again.  Grandmother’s arms again.  She’ll cradle us in her arms again.

~Quoted in Peter Matthiessen, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, 547

Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, a Micmac Indian, faced her own death with the same openness that Black Elk reveals.  A mother and activist involved at Wounded Knee, she was mysteriously murdered and found frozen in the snow in a remote area of Pine Ridge reservation.  Her hands were cut off and sent in a jar to the FBI in Washington for a fingerprint check.  Her sister, Mary Lafford believes someone connected with the FBI killed her.  AIM leader Dennis Banks said that her killer was not just the triggerman but the cultural triggerman of centuries.  “She wasn’t killed by just one person.  It was what she represented and what kin of person she was.  What happens to people in four hundred years?  Maybe that is the answer.  Maybe four hundred years killed Anna Mae” (Matthiessen, 268).

How Cultural Invasion has Affected North American Culture 

Down the root of Conquest our bodies receive the insult.

~Meridel Le Seur, Ripening, 268

Let us all return

It is the people who give birth to us,

to all culture, who by their labors

create all material and spiritual values….

only they have the future in their hands.

Only they.

~Meridel Le Seur, Ripening, 219

Native American philosopher John Mohawk links the birth of racism to the conquest of the fifteenth century and a white European worldview that continues its mission of conquest through today’s mission of bringing “progress” to less developed nations.

It is said that the Conquistadors spilled more blood than any group of people ever spilled up to that time….[Their]mentality also said that they had to dehumanize the victims of the conquest….Even modern scholars identify the period of the conquest as the birth of racism in the modern world.  It was the first time that arguments were seriously put forward in courts of Spain, especially at Vallaloid, arguing that the Indians were biologically inferior beings, that they were not even human beings at all, that they were really beasts of burden, that they were sub-humans as you would treat a burro or as  you would treat a monkey.  Some of the same things are still being argued in the Western Hemisphere, whether peoples of different physical characteristics are fully human and have full human rights and have full civil rights.  All those arguments still go on right to the 1980s, certainly in places like Guatemala, and Peru, and Mexico where the conquest, I say, is not ended.

~John Mohawk, “The Indian Way is a Thinking Tradition,” Northeast Indian Quarterly, 15