- Tomorrow's leftover lies layering the scars in your eyes.
- -- John Trudell, "Bad Dog"
- One hundred twelve years later, the human species sits
frightened, wrapped in its security blankets, hunched by its hearthfires,
awaiting the same inexorable, unstoppable technological doom that erased
Sitting Bull and his Sioux family from the face of the Earth on the snowy
plains of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in the year of our Lord 1890.
-
- It was the Ghost Dance that had made the white man nervous,
they said. A five-day paroxysm of ritual that united the living with their
deceased ancestors was what totally freaked out the Bible-thumping whites,
who, like Christopher Columbus, could not understand why these savages
refused to accept the Almighty Power of Jesus Christ. In this acceptance,
it must be remembered, the natives were required to give up the lush lands
they had gently tended for generations, and were expected to move to areas
that were of no use to anyone else. This was the will of God, and the American
government. As a result, just like Columbus, just like the Israelites in
the Old Testament, the jittery American heroes felt justified and holy
when they slaughtered the hapless pagans.
-
- Who knows what small events make fights start, make wars
break out? Just as the white man broke every single treaty he ever made
with the original inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere (103, I think it
was; we kept none; we're still breaking them, here and elsewhere), it was
a stray shot that rang out and the shooting started. Or so the white man's
history recounts.
-
- Killed was the last great American Indian leader, Sitting
Bull, and the faded remnants of once a great nation of hunter/gatherers,
who exhibited a respect for nature and the land that has not really been
seen since. This paltry, starving group took its place among the nameless
corpses of 60 million human beings eradicated from the sacred Earth in
the drive by "the greatest country the world has ever known,"
the United States of America, on the way to fulfilling its date with manifest
destiny. A manifest destiny of mass murder, repeated over and over, forever
and ever, Amen. As we see in the continued unjust imprisonment of Leonard
Peltier and the imminent plans to obliterate Iraq for very spurious reasons,
this destiny continues today, with ever renewable fury.
-
- The ghost dance, which after the massacre at Wounded
Knee soon faded from widespread Indian practice " but not consciousness
" accurately foreshadowed what was to come for the luckless Lakota.
Surely, some of innocent souls must have known they were dancing with their
own ghosts. We all must surely realize that now, at this very moment, we
too are dancing with our own ghosts.
-
- The history of the human race, particularly as it manifests
now with all manner of horrific atomic and biological devices poised and
aimed to strike more hapless peasant humans with darkly tinted skin, can
now be seen as a ghost dance of its own kind, an innate human drive to
kill for abstract concepts like "glory" and "freedom"
and, God help us, "homeland security." It is a ghost dance, macabre
and horrible, all its own. Perhaps this is the single most obvious distinguishing
characteristic of the human race.
-
- Though of course it was preceded by millenia of random
slaughter from the Stone Age onward, the 19th century extermination of
the American Indians became the paradigm of modern imperialist behavior,
as the Brahmins of every country find ever more warped reasons to extinguish
the lives of the dark-skinned indigenous peoples of the world. In every
conflict in every nation " Israel, Iraq, India and throughout Asia
and the Americas " it is the colonialist whites who continue to exploit
their dark cousins. The prized commodity may change as time passes "
most recently from tea to oil " but the colors of the conquerors and
their dead victims do not. The rationales today are cloaked in cryptic
economic invective, but at bottom, it is the race issue that divides the
planet into haves and have nots. Every single person of color knows this
in their hearts.
-
- Realizing this, racism, then, can be seen as the driving
force behind this colonialism and imperialism that threatens, even now,
every one of us inhabiting the Earth, for the killer is no less damned
than the victim, in the hateful system he is forced to live in.
-
- The rise of capitalism in the 16th century in the form
of British banks coincides exactly with the rise of African slavery and
this horrid legacy continues to be the dark side of American freedom to
this very ugly day. If there were no slaves, capitalism would fail, and
there you have the evil engine that powers "the greatest nation in
human history" and also continues to keep the world in a state of
endless war.
-
- So now we can see clearly that the World Trade Organization,
or the deceitful brutality perpetrated by the out-of-control Israelis,
is nothing more than a continuation of the murderous Crusades that white
European rationalists have perpetrated on dark Asian, Arab and African
victims since the days of the Roman empire. For all the sophisticated rhetoric,
the Crusades have never ended, and now, with weapons of incomprehensibly
devastating power about to be unleashed, everyone is threatened by it,
both the user and the used.
-
- What is going on now has always been going on, with the
vast majority of people far from the battle zones comfortably distracted
by their precious material possessions and meaningless quests for social
style, not realizing that as accessories to mass murder, they will be just
as profoundly affected by this unsolved human riddle as any child disfigured
by the evil legacy of depleted uranium ammunition contaminating the earth
in the fields where they play.
-
- This is the legacy of civilized human behavior. For all
of us, this is our very own ghost dance.
-
- In this time of fear and fascism, however, some people
are still trying to think clearly.
-
- The Gaian philosopher William Irwin Thompson writes,
if Bush decides to use nuclear weapons against Iraq, we are clearly on
the brink of a new dark age and all bets are off for the survival of everyone.
-
- "We ceased being an educated society when television
made politics an extension of the entertainment industry," Thompson
writes in Annals of Earth, Vol. 20, November 2002, in an essay titled "We
Become What We Hate."
-
- He notes: "Violence on the part of the state is
called military operations; violence of the part of the revolutionaries
or the stateless is called terrorism by those holding the monopoly on state
violence," and concludes: "One cannot simply put one's faith
into one single institution: political, financial, religious, or academic,
and trust that its leaders will be right."
-
- "The world knows that there is an Islam that is
not that of the terrorists, but does the world know there is an American
other than Hollywood, McDonald's and Coca Cola ads that camouflage a foreign
policy of arms sales and military support of authoritarian regimes?"
To which I would add, is there ... really?
-
- Thompson believes we are on the hinge of changing eras,
from one of nation states to idea groups.
-
- The founder of the New Age think tank Lindisfarne Foundation,
Thompson foresees the world political system in the midst of change from
nation-states to philosophical entities and developing systems that are
not contained in any one country or any single religion. He also notes
that recent democratic progress in Iran, one of the world's oldest continuous
nations, and China, which has recently opened itself up to democratic economic
reforms, are positive signs on the world's political spectrum, and ones
that need to be acknowledged, rather than resisted and exploited by America
and her supercilious allies.
-
- But if America continues to try to plunder the rest of
the world with its military superiority and financial manipulation, as
it appears ready and willing to do, then we are facing a new dark age that
will affect everyone in the worst possible way.
-
- Will we wake up, or goosestep our way into oblivion,
performing our own ghost dance, like Sitting Bull and his family, for the
last time?
-
- The United States broke every treaty it ever made with
the indigenous native Americans. This is a telling fact all the peoples
of the world should take notice of.
-
- Would that our leaders perform that ghost dance and hear
the long-dead echoes of the Arapahoe chant:
-
- Light is Returning
- Even though this is the darkest hour
- No one can hold
- Back the Dawn
-
- John Kaminski is writer who lives on the coast of Florida.
- In January 1889, a Paiute Indian, Wavoka, or Jack Wilson,
had a revelation during a total eclipse of the sun. It was the genesis
of a religious movement that would become known as the Ghost Dance. It
was this dance that the Indians believed would reunite them with friends
and relatives in the ghost world. As the movement spread from tribe to
tribe, it soon took on proportions beyond its original intent and desperate
Indians began dancing and singing the songs that would cause the world
to open up and swallow all other people while the Indians and their friends
would remain on this land, which would return to its beautiful and natural
state. The unity and fervor that the Ghost Dance Movement inspired, however,
spurred only fear and hysteria among white settlers which ultimately contributed
to the events ending in the massacre at Wounded Knee.
-
- In the Ghost Dance, Grandfather [a universal title of
reverence among Indians and here meaning the messiah] says, when your friends
die you must not cry. You must not hurt anybody or do harm to anyone. You
must not fight. Do right always. It will give you satisfaction in life.
-
- For more on the Massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, see
- http://www.ibiscom.com/knee.htm
-
-
- Comment
- From Merlyn Eagle
12-22-2
-
- Dear Jeff -
-
- I enjoyed your article on the Ghost Dance, but the author's
facts are incorrect. Sitting Bull (Tatanka Yotanka) was NOT killed at
Wounded Knee. He was killed at the Pine Ridge Agency at his cabin in an
attempt to arrest him. He was shot by a tribal policeman named Red Tomahawk.
-
- The Chief that was killed at Wounded Knee was named Bigfoot
and he was slaughtered with the unarmed women, children and old people
when the 7th cavalry opened fire with Howitzers to avenge the 7th cavalry
for the defeat of Custer (Pahuska, the squaw killer)at the Battle of Little
Bighorn, known to the Lakota as The Battle of Greasy Grass and to the Wasichu
(White men) as Custer's Last Stand.
-
- It is important that the facts in this matter are correct,
or the credibility of a good article will undoubtably suffer.
-
- Sincerely,
Merlin Eagle
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