While at a thrift shop in Wisconsin not so long ago, I picked up a book called "Great Speeches by Native Americans," figuring it would make decent bathroom reading. You know, lots of stuff a page or two long, no complicated arguments, no plot. It's turned out to be quite interesting, though. \ Also, infuriating. I never really knew much about the Native Americans until I started reading Derrick Jensen, who talks quite frequently about how so many tribes managed to live in more or less the same places for thousands and tens of thousands of years without depleting them. Somehow my high school textbooks managed to omit this stuff, in addition to most of the stuff about how westward-bound settlers and the Army that cleared the way for and protected them deceived, pillaged, killed, etc, in order to expand. Maybe it was in there, but not much? Or maybe not much attention was given to it? Or maybe I just wasn't ready to hear it? Not sure, but I think that if more students were exposed to the words of the conquered and vanishing Indians, and encouraged to think about them and look for modern parallels, we might become a more humble, considerate, content country.
So, here's an especially striking speech from Sitting Bull, chief of the Hunkpapa Sioux, from around 1875:
"Behold, my friends, the spring is come; the earth has glady received the embraces of the sun, and we shall soon see the results of their love! Every seed is awakened, and all animal life. It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being, and we therefore yield to our neighbors, even to our animal neighbors, the same right as ourselves to inhabit this vast land.
"Yet hear me, friends! we have now to deal with another people, small and feeble when our forefathers first met with them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough, they have a mind to till the soil, and the love of possessions is a disease in them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break, but the poor may not! They have a religion in which the poor worship, but the rich will not! They even take tithes of the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule. They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her, and deface her with their buildings and their refuse. They compel her to produce out of season, and when sterile she is made to take medicine in order to produce again. All this is sacrilege.
"This nation is like a spring freshet; it overruns its banks and destroys all who are in its path. We cannot dwell side by side. Only seven years ago we made a treaty by which we were assured that the buffalo country should be left to us forever. Now they threated to take that from us also. My brothers, shall we submit? or shall we say to them: "First kill me,before you can take possession of my fatherland!"
This one in particular struck me as relevant because of the clear connections to Occupy Wall Street. I also recently downloaded a movie called "Nonpossession," about the life and thought of Venerable Beob-seong, a Korean monk whose obituary I wrote about here. I'm thinking of doing the subtitling myself and showing it downtown this month or next.
So, here's an especially striking speech from Sitting Bull, chief of the Hunkpapa Sioux, from around 1875:
"Behold, my friends, the spring is come; the earth has glady received the embraces of the sun, and we shall soon see the results of their love! Every seed is awakened, and all animal life. It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being, and we therefore yield to our neighbors, even to our animal neighbors, the same right as ourselves to inhabit this vast land.
"Yet hear me, friends! we have now to deal with another people, small and feeble when our forefathers first met with them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough, they have a mind to till the soil, and the love of possessions is a disease in them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break, but the poor may not! They have a religion in which the poor worship, but the rich will not! They even take tithes of the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule. They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her, and deface her with their buildings and their refuse. They compel her to produce out of season, and when sterile she is made to take medicine in order to produce again. All this is sacrilege.
"This nation is like a spring freshet; it overruns its banks and destroys all who are in its path. We cannot dwell side by side. Only seven years ago we made a treaty by which we were assured that the buffalo country should be left to us forever. Now they threated to take that from us also. My brothers, shall we submit? or shall we say to them: "First kill me,before you can take possession of my fatherland!"
This one in particular struck me as relevant because of the clear connections to Occupy Wall Street. I also recently downloaded a movie called "Nonpossession," about the life and thought of Venerable Beob-seong, a Korean monk whose obituary I wrote about here. I'm thinking of doing the subtitling myself and showing it downtown this month or next.
