We are still going to them and asking them to recognize our sovereignty, like we go to them and ask them for program money. Like we go to them and ask them for everything it is that we need. We still do that too much.
If the movement continues to grow we can work on defining our values and our philosophies so that we can understand them more specifically than just in the terms that our ancestors were very spiritual people and were good people. We cannot live in the glory of our ancestors. We must create our own way to go.
If we will take the patience and the time to understand what is going on and we instill in the coming generations, the children younger than us, if we instill in them the proper attitudes, then there will come a time when we can be in a better position than we are in now. Part of it is that we’ve got to do the hard work ourselves and the hardest job we’ve got to do is to understand our own limitations and capabilities as human beings. We must control our weaknesses.
What I mean by control our weaknesses is to understand what they are and understand how they affect the people, and not put ourselves in a position in which our weaknesses are going to bring dishonor to our people. I’m not saying that we’re going to be able to stop human weaknesses, I’m just saying, let’s understand these things and place them in the proper context.
It’s time for our people to start looking at the fact that maybe we don’t need leaders like we had leaders the last ten years or so. Maybe what we need right now is a little bit more direction than an individual leader can give us. Maybe we need some of the knowledge and wisdom of the old people because they have lived through all of this. Maybe, instead of leaders, we should have representatives. Maybe our elders should pick people to represent the movement because then everybody could be a representative, that’s something everybody could be. Maybe we should get a little bit away from the leadership concept.
If we have our elders pick our representatives to speak on certain issues, and if our representatives do not behave or conduct themselves in an honorable way to the people, then the elders would make the representatives answer to them and they could replace these representatives. Maybe we should start to think in terms of this, the conduct of the leadership.
Maybe we’re going to have to start getting involved in holding ourselves responsible for our conduct. If I’m a womanizer, maybe I should not be in the movement, because that’s not the most respectful way. Maybe if I’m an alcoholic, maybe I shouldn’t be a movement leader. Maybe I should have more control placed around me so that when I’m out to represent the people, I would do it in a good way. If I’m someone who loves money, I should not be out there as a leader for the people. Maybe, if I’m a money lover, but I could speak for certain issues for the people, then I should be controlled by this council of elders, see? They should say, ‘well, you can speak on these certain things, but if you don’t behave, then you will answer. You will be removed,’ or something else of this nature. But we’ve got to start thinking in other terms than of just following the leaders.
Because when we look at a lot of things, I don’t think it is enough for us to pat ourselves on the backs for the progress made because then that shows too much pride. That is too much of the wrong thing because for as long as this struggle has been taking place, we’ve just barely started. In my generation we want more glorious things. We believe in more glorious things than our conduct reflects. The things that we want, the liberation and the good things we want for our people, if we had those things tomorrow, many of us would become outcasts from our people because we couldn’t live up to those expectations. I’m not saying it’s a thing where we blame anybody for anything that happens. We have to understand that the bad things that have happened to us have happened because of our own weaknesses, that’s why they happened. The feds just came in and exploited them and manipulated us.
But I believe it is possible to build a movement where a snitch cannot get in. I believe it is possible to build a movement where rumors go nowhere. But before we can do that, we have to have a better understanding of ourselves. Once we have a better understanding of ourselves, then we can stop the snitches from coming in, and we can stop the rumors and the bribes from having influence on us. Then we’re in good shape.
A confusion has been put in all our minds. You know, television is the prime example of it. For every half-hour you watch television you probably see a good seven or eight minutes of commercials. And what are commercials doing? Commercials are telling you that you are worthless as a spiritual person. You are worthless unless you have this materialism to help you. Whether it’s Charmin toilet paper, or a brand new Monte Carlo car, or it’s Right Guard deodorant. They’re saying that as individuals, we need this thing that they can sell before we can have any validity. They put that into the children. Children watch TV at a very early age and that’s when they start telling them, ‘hey little kid, the other little kids will like you better if you can buy this Johnny War doll, here.’ Then the other little kids will like you even better if you can buy the Barbie doll. They don’t use commercials to say you’ll be more popular if you develop your mind and you think in terms of the People… in terms of, you know, serving the People. We never get any indoctrination like that. It’s all here… all indoctrination that we get to undermine us, and we’ve all received it. Things like television, we receive that all straight across the line.
Whoever has TVs and things of that nature believes in that concept and that philosophy. They tell us that we should emulate people like Nelson Rockefeller. I remember when I was a kid, and I was going to school and they said, well, the Rockefeller’s are industrious, therefore they’re wealthy. See, and I know that they programmed this into all the American people… Reality is, let’s compare wealth and greed. And then let’s define Nelson Rockefeller. Is he wealthy or is he greedy? They gave greed respectability by calling it wealthy. It turns all of our minds around, see? How can we fight a revolution with the Americans if we don’t understand these things?
First, we must go through the liberation struggle to free our minds. That’s when we take their power away from them, when we free our minds. But it’s a long, hard thing, because it then means that we have to accept certain things about ourselves, and that’s very hard. They removed our identity from us so they could take our self confidence away from us. Now the people no longer have confidence in themselves. It’s coming back, it’s coming back in the form of pride, but that’s not necessarily good that it’s coming back in pride. Pride fits into religion. I mean, as our confidence comes back, we should be thankful for it. That fits into spirituality. Well, the Christians are proud people, too. Ask them. The Americans are proud people too. Ask them. The people have no confidence in themselves and that lack of confidence comes from a lack of knowledge.
Two hundred years ago our people understood their environment. They had knowledge, and they knew what it was like to have to wait to get the food and to get their economics to work, and their spirituality to work. In today’s age, our people no longer know that… we no longer have that knowledge. All the knowledge we have is, well, ‘I’ll go to the welfare office.’ Or, if I have a job, ‘I’ll go over here and do what they tell me so many hours a week, and they’re going to give me some money.’ But that has no connection to our community. They have removed the knowledge of our lives away from us and they have put it into the hands of another, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the United States Congress. I believe this is why the confusion exists among the people now. I think that these are all symptoms of it. We’re the victims of a war, and the war’s still going on. It’s just… it’s a cultural war. The weapons of war against us have been the Christian church… America’s classrooms. They’ve been the alcohol, the public health. All these things have been instruments of war used against us. While some of our people physically survive, culturally they’ve been wiped out. The education system is the most destructive to us now, in this century. The last century it was…the Christians and it was the alcohol and the military, but this century it’s been education. The American education system has been the most destructive thing to us. Because whether we’re called sellout or militant, Christian or traditionalist, we’ve been to the classroom… every last one of us… The confusion now in our minds is because in that classroom they removed our identity from us. That is why it is harder for us to communicate with our spirit now.
The oppression is not worse, it’s not getting worse. It’s just that we are experiencing it in our lifetime. You know, they wiped out almost all the Mandan with smallpox blankets. The oppression is not getting worse, the oppression has always been. …I believe that the oppression is constant and consistent and we have to accept that fact because America went through a point where they ignored us and some of us started speaking our minds. We started getting involved and organizing. I think that we should go back and ask the people who lived on the reservations during the 1920s and 1930s what oppression was all about, people who were there before our lifetime. I think that we must accept the fact that oppression is here, it’s not going to get better or worse, it’s going to stay here. Anything they do to us cannot be worse than what they’ve done to us already. I think we can accept that and we can have the patience of our ancestors that we are supposed to have and get off the television mentality. We watch television or we go to a movie and the story opens, we meet all the characters and the plot develops and we meet the bad guys and the good guys and within an hour or two the good guys triumph over the bad guys. We expect that during our lifetime, and it doesn’t happen like that.
I become concerned about an issue and I get involved for three years and I do not get any results, that does not mean that the oppression is getting worse, it just means that real life is different from the fantasy life that they program to us. So if we look at things in that context, they were oppressive when they came here, oppressive after they got here, oppressive today, and they will be oppressive tomorrow. If they’re going to make their fascist state a little more visible, a little more public, you and I will be treated no differently than our ancestors were treated over a hundred years ago. The white people will be treated differently. The fascist state will take them now. They’re going to be the new Indians.
The nature of the American state is that people are addicted to materialism, but America’s imperialism is running out of other places to expand into. And yet, the nature of the American state is that it must exploit. That is the nature of it. The day must come when it must exploit its own. Already that’s what inflation and recession and all these things are. A redistribution of wealth, that’s what they are gearing for now. Why do you think this repressive state and the police powers are being organized now? They are not putting that together just to deal with the Indians. But they are putting it together. They are not putting it together just to deal with the Blacks, because numerically they don’t have to. They know, in their final analysis, that as they move toward the redistribution of wealth, the white people are going to fight them, in a much more militant and violent way than we ever did. That’s what they’re preparing for.
What our threat to them is that we represent a different idea, different values, that is the threat we represent to them. That’s why they must discredit us and attack us the way they do. Because they see that if we get it, then everybody is going to want it. The movement has been more oriented towards human rights than anything else. We never called it that, it wasn’t our terminology, but we have been more oriented towards human rights. In the 50s and 60s, the system got the Black people to go from human rights to civil rights. If we’re successful in our human rights question, that means that the Black people and the white people are going to also relate to their human rights. If one thing gets its head up, they are worried that all the other ones will.
What they are gearing towards now is repressive methods, they have done it to AIM. They came down very repressively, but no harder than they came down on our ancestors. They killed us with smallpox blankets two hundred years ago, they (will) shoot us with a laser gun tomorrow. The laser gun makes it more brutal than the smallpox blanket? No. Just the fact that they went through the act of denying us our rightful place as human beings upon this earth, that is what is ugly. Whether they do it with a smallpox blanket, a bottle of wine, or a M16 rifle, they’re still doing it.
So I don’t think that it’s unreal to look to the next generation. We must put into the minds of the children and the young people the philosophy of serving the people. Because if we rush too much, we’re going to overlook something, and whatever we overlook, our enemies won’t.
We must deal with reality. The history of our people covers a hundred thousand years, say. The white people have been here for five hundred years. Five hundred years into a hundred thousand years is nothing. It is a very short period of time. Our people had to adjust to living in nature with a bow and arrow. They hunted the mammoth, they had to adjust to the things that nature put next to us. The white people have only been here for five hundred years. Just as our ancestors learned to live with the mammoth and the bison and learned how to take from the earth what was needed and to live, then we must also learn that maybe the Christians are the last of the predators that nature has sent against us.
I think that economic self-sufficiency is crucial right now. I think that we have to look for secure territories and a land base, you know. We have to keep from becoming too arrogant, because we do not own this land. That is one thing I do not like to hear our people say, “we’re the landlords, we own the land,” because we don’t own the land. We live here, and we use it, and we are entitled to our share of the land, but own it? We do not own it. When the white people first came here, we told them, “we do not own it, we cannot sell it.” You go and you read the talks, you read some of the speeches that the old people made. We can not sell the land, we do not own it. But now we (say) that we own the land. The treaty. That’s something the treaty instilled in our mind, “we own this piece of land.” That’s also a cooptation of our values. So I would say (we need) an economic base and secure borders for the use of our land, but we must have discussions among our people about whether we own it and what is this whole thing about owning land?
Economic self-sufficiency is necessary, yes, it is. It’s very necessary and it’s going to be extremely hard to bring about right now because the feds and the corporations want the resources that are on our lands, so economic self-sufficiency in the traditional way of our farming the land and things like this cannot be done in a practical way other than as individual self-sufficiency, the people starting to learn how to do it individually or maybe collectively. But as far as it becoming a tribal enterprise and using the land to gain economic self-sufficiency, it will not happen that way. It cannot happen that way, because we will use up the land.
I see it this way. I think at this point (we need) smaller communities and people thinking in terms of economic self-sufficiency and trying out the principles and practices, experiencing, trying to create it out of that. At some point, it will all come together, and will be made to happen. But right now, reservation self-sufficiency? No. We are too dominated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. They will not allow us economic self-sufficiency, because (with that) they will no longer exist. The corporations will no longer have an easy avenue to take what belongs to us. If we have economic self-sufficiency, then they will have to deal with us in a fair way. The way it is now, they go through the Bureau and take what they want for the prices that they want.
Survival schools. What I look at in the long run is its experience. We must learn things through the trial and error process of mistakes. It’s not a solution, see, just because we go out and start a survival school. We’re not immediately going to start to do everything right and we’re not immediately going to start to do everything right within five years, because, you see, we’re starting from scratch. We’re just starting from our own basic little ideas on how to make these things happen. We have no rule books to follow. But we should be consulting the elders. “What do they think should be included in these schools? What do you believe our children should be learning? The biggest problem that the survival schools are confronted with today is that those that receive federal funding must be structured according to federal guidelines. That’s the biggest problem. But what we are learning conforming to federal guidelines in order to get funding and things to make the school go — it can be a good thing. We can learn the basics of being together under the idea of learning. We can learn the basics, but it’s too soon to say right now what will come out of the survival schools that receive federal funding. It could be totally the other way. It could be an Indian replica. That is a possibility that exists.
I believe that the young people coming out of the survival schools, they’re going to come out with more of a strong dedication and idealism at a younger age than we did. The process will still take place. One of the problems that we have as Indian people is that we don’t accept our own human ways. We want everyone that’s going to help us to be like gods. We want them to have no weaknesses. The minute they show weakness, we jump on them and criticize them if they don’t do it our way. This is a problem we have.
Let’s say I don’t believe in the survival schools, hypothetically. Well, then my biggest obligation would be to try and produce something that worked. I could put more energy to that than to go around and attack what I don’t like, because it’s a matter of going back to our words and actions. I would hope that the final results of the survival schools would be a more indigenous philosophy. I mean that the people who will become the graduates, that come through the school, and even the people who work in the schools, I would hope, after say ten years have passed, that we are going to see more of the indigenous philosophy than we saw before the thing started.
But we’re faced with a hard obstacle. I look at some of the schools and I think that they’re not quite at the sharing of knowledge concept yet. They’re still at the education concept like we went through the pride concept in order to get to the next place. Because some of the schools I go into, I see that the staff is separated from the students and the administrators are separated from the staff and students. I don’t understand how that can be a place to share knowledge.
(These excerpts from an interview with John Trudell come to us through the courtesy of MIGIZI Communications. MIGIZI is an Indian media collective working out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. We are grateful to them and hope to continue to strengthen each other’s work in the future. ~
SOURCE: Akwesasne Notes (Winter) Vol. 10 No. 5