I’d like to welcome you all here tonight. And I’d like to talk tonight. And I would like to talk in honor of all of our women warriors. Those who are here and those who have left us for another world, that are with our ancestors. And I would like to honor a man named Leonard Peltier. And I would like to talk in honor of the Earth, which is a very sacred place. And it is the only place that we have.
I would like the people to understand that our mother Earth is the female manifestation of the creation. And that we must show proper respect to her. We cannot show the proper respect to the women. We cannot show the proper respect to the elders. We cannot show the proper respect to the children. We cannot show the proper respect to ourselves, if we ignore our mother earth.
We are not talking about any political solution. We are not talking about politics at all. We’re talking about survival. Our survival will be guaranteed by us, the human people accepting our responsibilities and honoring the earth and all of the natural world of which we are a part. There are natural laws. We must honor and we must obey those natural laws. This is the only way we can show the rightful honor to the earth.
We must remember that the earth is the source of all of our life. The earth takes care of us while we are alive in this form and the earth takes us back when we have departed to the spirit world. We must remember the earth. We must remember our spiritual real power connection to the earth. We are an extension of the spirit of the mother earth. This is our source of power. Not the economics. Not the politics. Not repressive government. Not liberal government. Our source of power is us and our spiritual connection to the earth and our recognition of that.
We are talking about our survival. The human people are in a real serious situation today. Because there are bad people in the world and these bad people have exploited our lives for many many years and they have every intention that they are going to continue to exploit our lives even in the process of destroying us and themselves. We must accept our responsibilities and stop these bad people from doing these things to us and to our mother, the earth. That is our responsibility.
All of the animals that are a natural part of the creation are fulfilling their obligations on the earth, and the only animal that has changed course is the human animal. We no longer fulfill our obligations in protecting the earth. We no longer live in harmony with the earth. And when we have taken these false ways then we help the bad people to bring down our destruction. They are bad people. Because they control the economics, and they have created illusions of respectability, does not mean that they are not insane. They do not know how to live with the earth. There is no sanity in the way that the human people and the earth get treated under these people’s manipulation. There is no sanity to it. There is no humanity to it. There is no rationalization for it.
Money, money as an answer and an excuse is not enough. Money is a false form of power. Money and oppressors, they come and they go. They do not stay. Only the human people are going to be able to stay. We are engaged in a very hard struggle. We are engaged in resistance. We must not limit ourself as a movement. We are engaged in resistance, resistance that passes knowledge and learning experience on to the coming generations. Resistance. This is the only way that we will survive. We must resist their attempts to intimidate us. We must resist their attempts to terrorize us. We must resist them. We must not be afraid to live our lives. We must not be afraid to die. We must not be afraid to think. We must not be afraid to stand up to them in their wrongness. We must not be afraid. When they have reached the stage where they can make us to be afraid to live, then we are going to be afraid to die and then we are violating the natural order of things because it is only natural that we should live and we should die.
We must not allow them to control our mind and create confusion. A confusion that makes us turn on each other for unimportant matters. We must understand that we are not each other’s enemy. We are the collective victim. The enemy sits back and laughs and it continues to manipulate us as long as we will not understand that. We must understand that as a natural part of the creation, the creation made the bear to be the bear. The creation made the horse to be the horse. The creation made things to be different and in that difference we are supposed to produce harmony. So we’re going to have to solve some of our racial difference. Because the Indian people are here to be Indian people and the white people are here to be white people. The problem is we got to straighten up. Not be changing each other into something that we’re not. Only by us assuming the responsibility of straightening up will we be able to honor our elder people. Will we be able to honor our women. Will we be able to honor our children. Will we be able to honor ourselves and the very sacred mother earth.
They are going to try to laugh at us. They are going to try to accuse us of being unrealistic. They’re going to throw words like progress at us. But let’s look at their progress and their lack of humanity and their lack of civilization. Machines do not make civilization. The human spirit is what creates civilization. The human spirit is what perpetuates civilization and not the machine. We must rebel against the mechanical age. We must place things in their proper perspective. We must understand that we misuse our energy every time that we allow them to misuse us. Because we are energy. We are spirit. We are an extension of the sacred mother earth. We must stop this abuse of energy. We must stop them in what they are doing to us.
We must do this because it is our obligation to the earth and to our coming generations. If we have differences of opinion. And we have different ways of looking at things we must understand that we have to find a way to create what is true unity. True unity means that we are going to be able to work together in calm and struggle and dedicated resistance and accept each other as different beings. And find a way to work with that difference because that’s what creates creative flow. That is what is going to give validity to our struggle.
We must never be afraid. Fear must not be a part of our life. The only thing that we should worry about is that we have lived our lives without honor. That is what we should worry about. We should not worry about dying. We should worry about trading existence for life. Letting these manipulators and these bad people control our lives so that we cannot live it, so that we cannot understand our spiritual connection. We are trading our life for existence.
We must understand what that connection has to slavery, because then we are not free. We must understand that slavery is more than the shackles they put around someone’s ankles. Slavery is the prisons that they build in our minds through their institutionalized madness. That is slavery.
We were not put here on the sacred mother earth to work for IBM or for the Air Force or for Standard Oil. We were put here to honor the earth. That is our obligation. We are the indigenous people of the Western Hemisphere. We will not fight you for ownership of the land, but we will stand up to all of these bad people who will come in and abuse and misuse the earth. We will protect our mother. We will stand, if everybody turns against us because they say the Indians don’t act right, we will stand in protection of our mother. We will stand, if it is by ourselves, if it is collectively with other people who are concerned about what is happening to our mother, then we will gladly embrace these people and take them into the family of man. But we will not change our ways.
We would rather not be accepted for what we are then to become something we’re not, for acceptance. We say that to our allies. We say that to the enemy. We will have a collective learning experience and through this collective learning experience we will achieve the knowledge that we need for our liberation. We are not involved in any revolution. We’re talking about liberation. Freedom from a value system. A set of values that is based totally on hypocrisy and dollar value. We seek liberation from the values of exploitation, manipulation, racism, sexism, ageism, classism. We seek liberation. We do not want to get involved in a revolution that we’re going to lose. Revolutions are based upon hate of the oppressor. Liberation is based upon love of the people and we will do whatever is necessary because of our love of the people and our love of the sacred mother earth, and I thank you for your time. ~
SOURCE: Off Our Backs, Vol. 10, No. 9 (October 1980)