“The man from Europe is still a foreigner and an alien. And he still hates the man who questioned his path across the continent.
But in the Indian, the spirit of the land is still vested; it will be until other men are able to divine and meet its rhythm. Men must be born and reborn to belong. Their bodies must be formed of the dust of their forefather’s bones."
~Luther Standing Bear (Lakota)
A Reply to the SOS ***************
It is time for the white man to wake up from his illusions. He imagines that he has “conquered” the native peoples of this land, North American Indian and Mexican Indian alike.
He is deluded.
He thinks the land belongs to him, and that we plan to “reconquer” it.
His mind is upside down.
The Earth, the land, does not belong to us.
We belong to the land.
It is a relationship that cannot, in the end, be disrupted, although our roles as caretakers of the land can and have been deeply harmed.
The land does not belong to the white man, and he does not as a rule, belong to or with the land.
He is a restless and violent stranger, tossing in the bed of his “power,” ever uncertain of his relationship to his relations and to himself, always tormented with the knowledge that his “conquest” is illegitimate. He is fearful. The only way he can rationalize his vicious history to himself is by imagining himself “superior,” while in reality he feels himself uprooted and, for that very reason, out of balance and “inferior,” – alone and afraid.
He is disconnected.
The white man claims our children, the children of the Mexica people, are “anchor babies,” and that we use our own children to give us - as “illegal” “aliens” - a legal pretext to be here.
In some perverse way, he is right, but for the wrong reasons.
We are anchored here.
We are anchored here by our ancestors, by our children, and by our closeness to the land over untold generations.
What he describes as “anchoring: is natural law, a law he considers a perversion and a manipulation. His mind is upside down.
We have been here forever – or, as your anthropologists would have it – for 30,000 years or more.
The recent arrival - white man - is an alien, not by law, not by nature, but by condition. His primary relationship to this land has been to destroy it. Even his concept of “illegality” is alien to this land and its nature. It is perverse, inside / out.
He talks of a “great American culture” that is disappearing, being “replaced by other cultures that are inferior and contradictory to everything this country was built upon.”
But the truth is that it is natural law that is bringing his culture to an end.
Its coming death is the fruit of his own labors, of the horrors he has committed – Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and the murder of over 100 million of our ancestors in the “conquest.” This is what stares back at him from the mirror and makes him fear the end that he has wrought.
He has built a world on the rape of his own mother, the Earth, and now his mines and oil wells are running dry. His economy and way of life are impossible to sustain.
It has nothing to do with us. His civilization is collapsing under the weight of its own madness. It is very likely that millions, even billions of people worldwide will die in the transition, the collapse of the wrongful and unjust world he has created.
The white man says he and his fellows must respond as his ancestors responded.
His fathers “responded” with mass murder. They took control of their mother the Earth through mass murder, and now, the son wants to defend the rape with more mass murder. He cannot look himself in the heart or in the eye.
The tree of “liberty” he wants to water was said by his fathers to be fed with blood.
He is hungry for blood.
He is boiling with madness and a consuming fear. He is tired of feeling like a foreigner in “his own country” but that is what he remains, in truth, a foreigner with no feeling for the Earth, and with a hatred for the cultures, the Peoples, it birthed.
The white man thinks he is instilling fear in us, and that we are not used to being “challenged.” He has remained blind to the unending resistance of our peoples for the last five hundred years, imagining it as “savage” recalcitrance, an animalistic resentment of our “superiors.” Not a decade has passed in 500 years in which we have not arisen in arms against him, and still he thinks we fear him.
He imagines that his aggression is “a new paradigm” with which we are unfamiliar, and that his arrogance, like that of Custer, is unknown to us. Custer… whose ambition made him unable to retreat…
He imagines that everything has just been invented, new, with him.
He has no memory.
If Custer could return from the grave, he, too, might say his opponents relied on “intimidation and the threat of violence in order to achieve victory” when he invaded their quiet villages.
Like Custer he invades us, and his declaration of war is a declaration of his intent to finalize the American genocide, to tear the native nations, Northern and Southern, apart - casting us again into third and fourth world “reservations,” apart from the clean, “superior” white race and its culture.
He never learns.
A Lakota man, Good Fox, said this: “I was told that after the battle two Cheyenne women came across Custer's body. They knew him because he had attacked their peaceful village on the Washita. These women said "You smoked the peace pipe with us. Our chiefs told you that you would be killed if you ever made war on us again. But you would not listen. This will make you hear better.
“The women each took an awl from their beaded cases and stuck them deep into Custer's ears.”
And now he says, he has a border to defend, that he must defend the laws of the white nation – laws he wrote to justify and “legalize” his own bloodthirstiness and theft.
But the “border” he would defend is a scar on the soul of our mother, the Earth. And he cannot hear her crying.
He would drive a stake through her heart, claiming her as “American land. Today. Tomorrow. Forever.”
But his flags and the swastikas of his allies can never bring him peace. Only listening can bring him peace. But like the ghost of Custer, he no longer has ears.
He has declared a war he cannot win, one that can end only in defeat or prison.
Perhaps his people, maybe his women, those with sense, who can speak to him in his own language, can reach him, can warn him, before it is too late.
