Crazy Horse said we live in the shadow of the real world and we really do. The coherency of our future depends upon us knowing who we are — and truly understanding who we are – because our relationship to reality and our relationship to power is based upon that understanding. Today we live in an industrial society and this technological perception of reality, this shadow world, presents a serious crisis: It is a reality where we don’t remember who we are, so therefore we don’t know who we are. We speak a language we don’t understand and because of this, we don’t know where we are. We are part of an evolutionary reality but part of the purpose of this technological civilization is to erase our memories and erase our identities.
Growing up, I lived between two worlds, the Native and the non-Native, and in this day and age I think they are both part illusion and part reality. When I moved between the reservation and off the reservation, some things were more real to me in my Native world than they were in the non-Native worlds; things of the human essence; and this relates to our overall perception and how our perceptional reality is altered. We now live in a time when it’s harder to know who we are and so it’s harder to understand our purpose, meaning that the real problem is the erasure of our identities. Genocide erases identities; all technological reality does. If we truly recognized who we are, this society we exist in and the way we live would be different. We all live on a reservation now, an industrial reservation that stretches across the world, and the alienation you can find in exteme forms on an Indian reservation — the loneliness, alcoholism, drug abuse and violence — is being replicated more and more throughout industrial society.
Severing our relationship to power continues to be the objective; to cloud our coherency and shroud our intelligence in the perceptional reality of this shadow world. But our relationship to power and reality is remembering and understanding who we are — we are the Human Beings: We know how to say the terms because they programmed them to us, just as we’ve been programed to seek answers and not understanding, like we’re programed to believe rather than to know. So this goes back to our identity: it’s crucial that we know who we are – we’re the Human Beings. we are shapes of the earth — and our relationship to reality is in that definition.
Our physical reality, our form — the bone, flesh and blood – is made up of the metals, minerals and liquids of the earth. The DNA of the human is literally made up of the metals, minerals and liquids of the earth. All of the things of the earth have the same DNA as the human does; everything is made up of the same metals, minerals and liquids of the earth but the shape is different and the purpose is different. We have “being,” which is our essence, our spirit, and all of the things of the earth have the same DNA, so all of the things of the earth have “being” and spirit. Nothing will ever change that reality, but what has changed is our perceptional relationship to reality.
We are this form of the earth and we have ‘being’ and we have to understand that because that’s our relationship to the reality of power. As human beings we are part of an ancestral lineage – our DNA comes through the millennia – so our relationship to power is in the earth because that’s where we physically come from, and our relationship to power is in that DNA ancestral lineage because that’s where the “being’ part of us has been all this time. Our relationship to reality is in that; that’s who we are; and all of the programming that has taken place has been to erase that identity.
We all share a common collective experience: we are all the descendants of tribes. Back in the time of the original dreams we were all members of tribes and we were all the earth’s children and we all knew that the earth was our mother. We were part of a spiritual reality. We were physical in a spiritual reality. Whoever we are today, we carry the genetic experience of our lineage from the very beginning, encoded within our DNA. It’s like our genetic memory and somewhere hidden in there we all come from a people that understood that we lived in a spiritual reality and because of that realization everyone of our beginning ancestral peoples understood that life was about responsibility; so we were responsible for the past and the future as well as the present. So we knew who we were, we understood what we were saying, we knew where we were and we knew our purpose, and this reality lives in our genetic memories. The purpose of technology is to erase our realities and make us powerless but ancestral power is real.
This technological perception of reality is like a disease and as it spreads it infects the spirit of the people and it affects our perception of reality. Separating everybody from any ancestral understanding and teachings, and erasing our identities, severed us from our spiritual power and I think that is one of the principal reasons why people feel powerless, because that power is being diverted over into something else. We live in a reality where we understand that uranium can be taken out of the earth and put through a mining process that converts the ‘being’ part of uranium, that DNA, into a mutation of power that is called energy: electrical energy that can be controlled by man; and we recognize that a consequence of that mining process is toxic waste. We know they do it with fossil fuels; they take that dinosaur DNA out of the ground, put it through a mining process and convert it into gasoline, which is then converted into another electrical energy system that leaves behind its pollution. And what I’m saying is that they are doing this to us. They are mining the “being” part of the human through our intelligence.
This technological civilization is predatory upon our lives. Today, how many people feel that something is missing from their lives, like purpose or understanding or self-worth? The ‘being’ speaks to the human through feelings and the way most people feel is powerless because the ‘being’ part of human is being mined and converted into a form of mutated power called energy that is used to run the authoritarian, material, technological systems of this industrial society. We’re the gasoline that runs it just like the dinosaur runs the internal combustion engine. And the pollution that is left from mining the ‘being’ part of human is every doubt, fear and insecurity that we have and that pollution keeps us from seeing clearly and so every thought becomes reactive; a reaction to this haze.
Everybody is indigenous to the planet. We’re indigenous to different land bases and our DNA physically comes from those land bases and somewhere in each and everyone of us there is a collective genetic memory that goes back to the beginning of the original dream — to the origin of our stones – and our relationship to power and reality is connected to us understanding that, but we are in a technological perception of reality that does not want us to understand that. If we understand that we’re the human beings we’ll know that we’re physical entities in a spiritual reality and our purpose is to perpetuate and maintain that spiritual reality. And the spiritual reality of life is about responsibility.
The gift we’ve been given to protect ourselves as humans is our intelligence. Our intelligence is our medicine. We were not put here, defenseless, to be eaten up by this mining process. This mining process takes place through our intelligence, so if we understand the value and power of our intelligence we can influence our evolution.
To me, the mining process is the colonizer’s civilizing process. This predatory behavior pattern never really changes, it just outlasts the generations so after five generations have passed the behavior pattern can be as predatory as it ever was because after that long, who is going to remember what was there before? This is why it is important for them to separate us from our ancestral power, and in order for this to continue they have to neutralize our intelligence by creating this confusion in our perceptional reality. Going way back, at some point in the evolution of the human beings, this other perception of reality appeared that took the spirit away from the animals: from nature and the elements; and started changing spirit into human form, the gods and goddesses. With the coming of industrialization, the way many people prayed changed and religion emerged and became a mining tool for the technological reality that was manifesting itself through industrialization.
All human beings want to know where they come from, where they’re going, and what their purpose is, so you have to go there, to the very beginnings and the heart of the spiritual realities, to possess them. So the ‘God idea’ emerged – a god removed from the earth who owned everything because he made it – and at that point in our common collective ancestral memory, every one of our relations rejected this concept because the earth was the mother and the sky was the father and balance was maintained; the Great Spirit. As long as the human beings considered themselves to be children of the carth and a part of the earth they would not plunder the earth, so their perception of their mother to promote the ‘male God” theory in which all spiritual value is removed from the earth; so the earth isn’t your mother anymore, the earth is the dominion and property of this new god and you are to subdue it. That’s a completely different perception of reality, going from caring to diminance – that eath is no longer your mother – the land is something you claim, subdue and possess.
By about AD 1000 the descendants of the tribes of Europe didn’t know that they had come from tribes because they didn’t have that tribal memory anymore; 1,500 years had passed in which they had been turned into serfs. Landlords and royalty had been created and they were now their property. Then in about AD 1100 the Church decided that it was God’s government on earth and it launched its war for the possession of the souls of the “heathens” -— the Inquisition. If you thought differently to how the Church wanted you to think, you were guilty of heresy and you were tortured and executed and the Church took your property. This was a religious ritual that ran for 500 vears in Europe. This war was waged against the descendants of the tribes of Europe to get them to perceive reality differently – they had to love what they feared and what they feared was now possessing them – so love, fear and possession became one and the Western perception of reality has been unable to unweave that thread since then. What happened to the Indians here at the hands of the descendants of the tribes of Europe, happened to the tribes of Europe and their descendants, which is why they behaved the way they did when they got here.
There are many opinions about Columbus but whoever he was, he was like ‘the virus’. When Columbus and his followers got here and we told them who we were — ‘We’re the people’. ‘We’re the human beings’ — they didn’t understand because, as descendants of the tribes of Europe, that concept was no longer a part of their perceptional reality. When Columbus arrived in this hemisphere we had no protection against this disease of the spirit: there was no immunity to the virus because it came on the wind and on the water, this disease just took the shape of a man rather than something you cant see. By the time Columbus got here, the descendants of the tribes of Europe had been through about twenty generitions of having their spirits attacked, so Columbus had become physically and spiritually the possession of something else; he didn’t know what it meant to be a human being anymore. We are stil the Human Beings. We’re The People. We are not Indians and we never were Indians. Only in our oppressor’s terminology and language, for the past 500 years, have we been Indians.
Religion has imposed its bondage but it’s all part of the economic bondage. What’s destroying us is cconomic manipulation and the lack of recognition of our sovereign natural rights. This is the thing that’s trying to alter our identity and alter who we are. The State, along with the corporations, are paranoid of people who think differently. The Church waged its war of Inquisition to stop people thinking differently and that seems to be the nature of the State now. ‘The spirit hunters — those who hunt free thought — come after us. We live in a reality they do not want us to see clearly so we won’t act coheretly. And ‘they’ are the spirit hunters; the colonizer: the industrial ruling class that is basically colonizing this planet and operating and creating a class of ‘ethnic rich’. When they talk about “ethnics” the smallest number are the rich – they are the minority – in a majority system the minority is the richest.
As a Native person, democracy means nothing to me. Democracy is supposed to be about the majority rule, but at the birth of democracy on this hemisphere if you were Indian — and the majority – you were automatically the enemy, so you didn’t get to participate. If you were a woman you were considered to be mentally inferior, so you didn’t get to participate. If you were black you were somebody’s property, so you didn’t get to participate. And if you were a white male who didn’t own land you had no taxable value, so you didn’t get to play either. This is the reality of the seed called democracy that was planted here: the smallest number of people, the ethnic rich of their day, decided what the institutions of democracy are here. It’s not about freedom either. The lie I see in freedom is that if I believe in my freedom, that means that I make the rules, which means that I have to accept evervbody’s interpretation of freedom; so a racist has the freedom to be a racist, and so forth, It’s about responsibility not freedom. If we take our responsibility and exercise our responsibiliey then we will be free and our rightful place will be manifested. Every generation has the responsibility to create the living reality and way that they are going to live with the earth. It is irresponsible to keep ourselves chained to Dark Age controlling thoughts that distort the lineage of our genealogy.
If you participate in this system. will it get better? You can see in the common collective psyche that people feel powerless; they allow this lie and they and accept this lie. We are told that the more money we make the more powerful we become, but thats not true. The more money we make the more access to authority we have but it has absolutely nothing to do with power, it’s about authority. In actuality authority represents an absence of power, that’s why it is needed. If we call authority power then we do not see ourselves clearly. Our relationship to power is connected to our relationship to the earth and the use of our intelligence. Everything that has been done to us is to make us believe them, but if we don’t believe them they cant mine us.
Pragmatically speaking, I think as Native people we can express the realities of our situation now more accurately through our culture and our art because our culture and our art addresses the truth and the reality of who we are as a people. Thats better for us than to be chasing a lot of political activism because it’s not our politics, its not our political system and its not our structure. By expressing who we are and our situation through our culture we don’t have to relinquish our identities. Our struggle didn’t start with wanting the right to participate in their system, our approach to America has always been, ‘We want to be different. We want to be who we are. We just want you to honor our treaties and the legal obligation you have to us’.
We are the result of 500 years of genocidal policies against us and in an evolutionary context, many of us speak English now. If we don’t speak our Native languages it doesn’t mean we’re not Native anymore, it just means, “Here is who we are today”. Part of the problem is that others want to keep us in the 1800s. Some of us speak a different language now and there are difference artistic forms but that doesn’t diminish who we are. We are the Human Beings; shapes of the earth. We are the land. ~