This statement is by John Trudell, national chairman of the American Indian Movement, issued in September, 1975.
We are human beings. Alcohol makes us drunks. Pride and history make us “The People.” I wish everyone would think about this. Before we were “Indians”, we were “The People.” For the Europeans to justify with their humanitarian beliefs the oppression that they have put on our people, they had to create a false label for us. They had to call us something that was not human. Something other than what we actually were. When Columbus came here and thought he was in India, he called us ” Indians” and so we have been “Indians” for only a brief period of time in the history of our people. Our people have been on this land for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. Our people are the product of this land. We can refer to ourselves as the indigenous, the sovereign people, the native people, or native Americans, but we are “The People” as we relate to being “The People”, as long as we act accordingly.
In the life and society of “The People,” our function was to look out for the People. It was to serve the People. It was so that our people may live, so that “The People” may survive. It was to look out for the unborn. It was to respect the ways of the ancients and our ancestors. Our total purpose in life was to serve “The People.” This was our religion. This was our politics. This was our social system. “The People.” But the Europeans came and we changed from being “The People” to being the “Indians.” The Europeans said the Indians were lazy. The Europeans said the Indians had no religious spiritual beliefs. The Europeans said the Indians were savages. The Europeans said the Indians had no soul, no inner life. The Europeans said the Indians were not human. The Europeans never called us “The People”, and through this European process, it was made easier for them to justify the murder, the rape, and the stealing of our culture.
As this process went on, we started believing them. They caused us to believe them in many ways. They have done it through the Christian church. They have done it with their history books. They have done it with the Sharps rifle, the Winchester rifle, the M-16, and the grenade launchers. They have done it with the tactical squads. They have done it by destroying our belief in ourselves. But most importantly, they have done it with the use of alcohol. They took our spiritualism, and they took our children and they cut our hair. They talk to us about their Christian ways and Christian values. And they pushed the number one drug in the world, alcohol. We can look back 200 years to the 1700s, where they used alcohol as a form of barter with our people. The French were selling $250,000 a year in alcohol to our people in the form of trade for furs and pelts, and for the things that we had. And our land. When they could not make deals with the people, they gave us their alcohol, and then when we became drunk, they took what they wanted, because while we were drunk, we could not oppose them. Because when we were drunk, we were not in our right minds. We had no spiritualism left.
We look at the acculturation process of the American state. Some 200 years ago the people that were directly responsible for the moral and spiritual leadership of our people, the holy men, the war chiefs, the peace chiefs, they told the people: “Don’t use the alcohol.” They said that the alcohol is no good. They said that if we stayed with the white man’s ways of using the alcohol, we would only defeat ourselves. Then we look at 200 years of acculturation and now there are very few of the people in our leadership that find alcohol unacceptable. We can take it for granted that everyone condemns it. Everyone pays lip service to recognizing how damaging it has been to our community. But now our tribal leadership, they get drunk. Now our youth, they get drunk. Now the people that form the productive segment of our society, and the people that should be working and helping to fulfill the needs and obligations of the people, they get drunk. The BIA comes into our communities and we get drunk together. We go into the little redneck bars and we get drunk. We fraternize and socialize with the enemy, but only when we are drunk, and the acculturation process has been really slipped upon us. It has been done in a way that was both flagrant and subtle.
We talk about programs, programs that say alcohol rehabilitation, about how we are going to stop the problem. The government will fund the alcohol rehabilitation program and say that they want to help us. But how can you rehabilitate? Rehabilitate means to make you better than you were. So, in theory, what they are saying is, “While you are a drunk now, I will take you and dry you out and make you a better drunk than you were before.” They talk about being concerned about the drinking in the Indian communities, yet the same governmental system that expresses this false concern licenses the liquor dealers. The same governmental system that is so outraged and shocked by the drinking in the Indian communities are the ones that let the bootleggers into the reservations along with the missionaries, the teachers, and the treaty commissions. They have always very quietly pushed alcohol into our communities. We talk about drugs. We must recognize the number one drug is alcohol. The man who sells heroin in the streets is a pusher and is labeled and identified as such. We must open our eyes and look around us and recognize that the pushers in our communities are the BIA. It’s the BIA who has its functions, its social gatherings for the people, and makes alcohol so easily available. It’s the BIA that holds tribal representative meetings such as National Tribal Chairmen’s Association meetings, and the National Congress of American Indian meetings, and they bring our tribal representatives into the cities like Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Albuquerque and they supply them with all the booze they can drink. So when we talk about pushers, we must recognize what a pusher is. We must recognize the purpose that a pusher exists for. We must recognize that exploitation at all levels.
We do not get much money to live on, but the bulk of what little money we do get goes right back into the bar room, whether that bar room is in the ghetto, a slum bar, or the Blue Room at the Hilton Hotel. The bar room is everywhere. It passes all class systems. So no matter if an Indian makes it in America, this is the final reward. As long as this is our new belief, then we are going to stay oppressed. When we willingly let ourselves into these places, then we must really sit down and evaluate how we ourselves contribute to the oppression of our people. We must think about how we hurt our people. We must think once again about the unborn. We must think once again about the respect that our elders should have. We must think once again about the love that our people have always felt for our Mother Earth. We must start recognizing that rhetoric and action are two different things, and if our rhetoric is separate and false from our actions, then we must recognize that we are destroying ourselves. It is not enough to stand up and say we are against alcohol and then go down to the bars and sit and drink because we want to be Indians. We must start thinking about what is good for “The People.” We must start thinking about how our actions are picked up by our young. How our deeds and our words are interpreted by our young people. Our young people follow in our steps.
In the days of our grandfathers, when our men were the warriors who looked out for the people, then our children grew up to be warriors to look out for the people. Now in today’s times, when our warriors are in the bars, our children grow up and they go to the bars and as long as this cycle of life or death is perpetuated, ”The People” will not survive. We must start considering the respect for life. You take a drink of alcohol, and it kills the brain cells. But if we go to the sweat lodge, it reinforces the beauty of life.
We must always remember the humility of our people because we are human beings, and we have the power of reason. We are the weakest of all of the Creation’s life because we must be held responsible for our acts. We must understand humility. We must understand that the respect for life is based on humbleness, and we must know, we must learn to know, that alcohol is based on arrogance. When we are drunk, we have no respect. We must lead our children by the hands. We must educate them, and we must say to them, “Everything is in their hands.” We must teach them the things that are good. We must help them to understand about the right to life and we must understand about death, because when people no longer believe in the right to life, when people believe in the alcohol bottle, they will become emotionally and eventually physically dead because alcohol kills. It kills the bits of humanity that exist within our spirits. It kills our bodies in knife fights, automobile accidents, and in suicides.
The whole American state is built upon the unreal things of life, the false things, the plastics, the chemically-altered foods, the big shiny automobiles that have been altered and changed from the natural resources as they were taken out of the ground and made into things of steel and metal.
We must understand that we cannot be ”The People” while we are drunk. We can be “Indians” and be drunk, but we cannot be ”The People.” We must put our feelings into our actions. We must be wary of becoming what it is that we dislike. In the ways of “The People,” we don’t know racism, but in the ways of the Indians, we do not like blacks because of their skin. We do not like whites because of their skin, and we do not like each other. We spend so much time disliking, we reach the point where we dislike each other. These are not respectful ways.
Everything that the Europeans have done to us leads us to disrespectful ways. We will not have survived if we have full-blooded Indians walking around who have the same value system as the white man. It is our ways that they want to destroy, and if the only way to destroy our ways is to destroy our bodies, then that is the way the system will do It. But it is foolish of us to help them. We must understand that we are all born to serve a purpose, and that purpose is to appreciate the right to life. That purpose is not to be disrespectful. That purpose is not to be a drunk. That purpose is not to be a sellout. That purpose is not to walk around and hold the white man and his governmental system in awe. Our purpose for life is to work and serve “The People” individually and collectively. But as long as we rationalize and accept the unlimited use of alcohol by our people, we only defeat ourselves.
Everyone of “The People” in America has been affected by alcohol. This is how our brothers and ·sisters get locked up in prisons. This is why our old people don’t eat good, or keep warm in the winter. This is how our young children get brainwashed and destroyed in their schools. This is how our land has been taken from us. Because every time an inhuman act has been committed against our people, we have been disoriented with the madness of alcohol. We will get drunk and we will fight each other over what we believe in, but we will not stay sober and stand up to a governmental system that is built on the value system of greed and corruption. These are the things that we must talk about with each other. These are the things that we must start beginning to understand, because alcohol is like the church, like the classroom, like the treaties, like the courtroom, and like the police departments and the liars. It is a tool to oppress.
But it is the most significant tool that they have because through alcohol we escape. Through the alcohol, we get the false courage. And while we are drunk, we talk about the great things that we will do. We talk about how respectful we are when we are drunk. We talk about love when we are drunk. We talk about things when we are drunk that we do not have the courage to say or believe while we are sober when our minds are in the right place, when our minds are linked with our hearts, because we cannot respect any form of life if we do not respect ourselves. And when we consume alcohol at the rate we have been, we do not respect ourselves. So we must get together with our children, with our elders. We must get together with our mothers and fathers, our aunts and uncles. We must get together with all our relations and we must start talking about these things. We must not fool ourselves. We must understand that when we talk about serving “The People” that it is hard sometimes. It is hard to serve ”The People” when the Government is trying to make trouble. It is hard to practice what we believe when we are met with lies and deceit from the outside agitators that come into our communities and make trouble. It is hard, but that is the way of life.
Our ancestors had to learn how to exist with nature, to be part of nature, and to survive as ”The People.” It is time that we started relearning this. We can survive, in spite of the fact that we are totally surrounded by people that have a different value system. But we can only survive as long as we have the will, as long as we will take the time to do what is necessary to survive. We can survive if we will take the time to educate ourselves, and to understand, not to name-call, nor to talk about each other behind each other’s back. Nor to get mad because we can be the only ones who are right and everyone else is wrong.
We can survive if we go and talk and visit with the ones who have the wisdom, our elders. We must not look upon our elders as the white man looks upon his elders. We must protect our elders. We must take their advice. We must listen respectfully and make our own decisions, but we must ask them to share their knowledge with us.
We can talk about alcohol until the last Indian is phased out of existence. Or we can stand up for what we know to be right and we can mend the circle of life that our people have always known to exist. But only we can do it. The government can’t do it for us. The churches can’t do it for us. The liberals or the conservatives can’t do it for us. Only we, only we can make things right within our own communities. We have nothing to be afraid of if we have belief in ourselves, if we have belief in our people, if we have belief in all the things that are sacred to us. Then we don’t need the alcohol to get by. That is all. ~
SOURCE: Akwesasne Notes