Take Back the Earth (also known as the Thanksgiving Day Speech) | November, 1980

We’re faced with a very serious situation in this generation. There are insane people, who wish to rule the world. They wish to continue to rule the world on violence and repression. And we are all the victims of that violence and repression. We as the indigenous people of the Western Hemisphere have been resisting this violence and this oppression for five hundred years. We know that the black people have been resisting it for at least that long. And we know that the white people have had to endure thousands of years. And now it’s come full swing to this generation that we live in.

Nuclearization of the world. See this cannot be. We cannot allow this to continue to go on. We cannot do it. We cannot expect that the pro-nuclear oppressor, that other side, we cannot expect that they’re going to change for us. They are going to become more brutal. They are going to become more repressive. Because it’s a matter of dollars and their illusionary concepts of power. We have to reestablish our identity. We have to understand who we are and where we fit in the natural order of the world. Because our oppressor deals in illusions. They tell us that it is power. But it is not power. They may have all the guns, and they may have all the racist laws and judges and they may control all the money, but that is not power. These are imitations of power and they are only power because in our minds we allow it to be power. But it’s all an imitation. Racism and violence. Racism and guns. Economics. The brutality of the American corporate state-way of life is nothing more than violence and repression, and it has nothing to do with power. It is brutality. It’s a lack of a sane balance. The people who have created this system and perpetuate this system, they are out of balance. They have made us out of balance. That have come into our minds and they’ve come into our hearts and they programmed us. We live in a society that has put us out of balance. And because we are out of balance, we no longer have the power to deal with them. They have conquered us as a natural power. See, we are power. They deal in violence and repression. We are power. We are a part of the natural world. All the things of the natural world are a natural part of the creation that feed off the energy of our sacred mother Earth. We are power. But they have separated us from our spiritual connection to the earth. So people feel powerless.

We look at the oppressor and we look at the enemy, because they have the most guns and the most lies and the most money. People start to feel powerless. We are power. We are a natural part of the creation. We were put here on this sacred Mother Earth to serve a purpose. And somewhere in the history of people we’re forgetting what the purpose is. The purpose is to honor the Earth. The purpose is to protect the Earth. The purpose is to live in balance with the Earth. The Earth is our mother. We will never free ourselves as human people. We will never free ourselves as sexual people. We will never free ourselves until we address the issue of how we live in balance with the Earth.

Because all of our resistance and all of our struggle is hollow, it’s false, it’s another one of those oppressors hypocrisies if we do not look out for the welfare of the Earth first. Because I do not care who it is, any child that turns on their Mother is living in a terrible terrible confusion. The Earth is our Mother. We must take care of the Earth.

They pollute. This oppressor, this machine, this machine that has gone mad and run amok, it is berserk. They keep telling us, you know progress, they keep telling us face reality. Well, let’s deal with reality. Reality is the Earth can no longer take this attack. We can no longer allow this thing to continue where it’s polluting the air. It’s polluting the water. Polluting our food. They pollute the air, they pollute the water, they pollute our food, they pollute our minds. They put us out of balance. They have made us be insecure with ourselves. They put us into a situation where we have to play many roles. We got to be chauvinists, we got to be on some kind of a class trip, or some kind of an illusionary power trip. We’ve got to play a role. We’ve got to play a role to communicate with other people. We got to go through this charade because they have attacked our self confidence. They have attacked our self confidence and they have made us to listen to them. They have made us to believe that they are power. But they are not. They are violent and they are brutal, but they are not power. We are a natural part of the earth. As a natural part of the Earth we have the energy and the power that is the earth. The earth will take care of us, if we will remember the Earth. In more than just our words. If we will remember the Earth in our way of life. We are all here to play a role. All of the animals and all the life on the Earth is playing its proper role, except the human people. We are betraying our purpose here. And that is why we live in the confusion that we live in. They want us to believe that we are powerless. We are a natural part of the Earth. We are an extension of that natural energy. That natural energy which is spirit, which is power. Power. A blizzard is power. An earthquake is power. A tornado is power. These are all things of power that no oppressor, no machine age can put these things of power in a prison. No machine age can make these things of power submit to the machine age. That is natural power. And just as it takes millions and billions of elements to make a blizzard to happen. Or to make the earthquake to make the earth to move. Then it’s going to take millions and billions of us. We are power. We have that power. We have the potential for that power. I remember in the sixties and the seventies I heard all this thing about power to the people and I never really understood. Everyone was saying power to the people and they were talking about demonstrating, they were talking about vote. They were talking about dealing on the terms of the oppressor. Our power will come back to us. Our sense of balance will come back to us when we go back to the natural way of protecting and honoring the Earth. If we have forgotten how to do it, and if we think that it looks overwhelming and we can never accomplish it, then all we have to do in each of us as an individual can go out, and we can find some spot on the earth that we could relate to. Feel that energy. Feel that power. That’s where our safety will come. The earth will take care of us. We have to understand that the American corporate state will not take care of us. They do not care about us. Maximize their profit. That is where their whole life value is placed upon. Maximize the profit. They will turn us against each other to maximize the profit, because they have done it in the past.

Nuclear energy. It’s the final assault. Nuclear energy should tell each and every one of us that they have gone beyond the reasons of sanity. That they are no longer sane. That they no longer deal with the real natural world. Because they want to create a radioactivity that is going to make it impossible for the Mother Earth to take care of our life.

We will not destroy the world. We are arrogant and we are stupid and we are foolish if we believe that we will destroy the world. Man has the ability to destroy all of the people’s ability to live on the earth. But we do not have the power to destroy the earth. The earth will heal itself. The earth will purify itself of us. If it takes a billion years to get rid of the radiation, the earth will do it because the Earth has that kind of time. We do not.

Our obligations and our loyalties have to be to the Earth, and they have to be to our sense of community, and to our people, and to our relations. Our obligations and our loyalty should not be to a government that will not take care of our needs. Our obligations in loyalties should not be to a government that has proven time and time again that it is the enemy of the people, unless the people are rich, in dollars.

That has been the consistent history of Western civilization and the American corporate state government. That’s reality. They are not our friends. They do not care for us. We have to face that reality that we have an enemy.

We want to talk about nuclear war. Everybody’s afraid of nuclear war that’s going to come between the Americans and the Russians and the Chinese or whoever. But are they not waging nuclear war on us now when the miners die from cancer from mining that uranium? Are they not waging nuclear war with Three Mile Island when they released that stuff into the air? Are they not waging nuclear war when they build all of these nuclear reactors and it’s not safe? Are they not waging nuclear war when they attack the Indian people on their land, militarily attack the Indian people and racistly attack the Indian people so they can get at the natural resources to feed their radioactive machine? That is war. And they are waging it against us.

They bribe Congress. They bribe your elected officials. They terrorize and intimidate your elected officials by getting the FBI to blackmail them. Those are acts of war. We will have to come to a time in our lifetime, and it will come in our lifetime, when we’re going to have to deal with the fact that the enemy has taken over your government. The government is not your ally. The government will use you, chew you up, and spit you out. You think that we are wrong? You think that we are talking unrealistically? Then go look at your elders and see what has happened to your elders in your machine aged society. See what kind of respect that they get? See what kind of a voice they are allowed in your society. To what kind of input they have. See what their final reward of happiness is after working for this slave state for thirty or forty years and allowing someone else to exploit their labors.

What is racism? Racism as an act of war. Sexism is an act of war. It’s a war against our human dignity and our rights to self respect. This is the war that they wage there. War. They are war-like. And we have to understand that American corporate state got to where it’s at through the act of war.

The next war. You want to worry, or you want to think about a war. The next war that you better be concerned about is the one that they’re going to fight here in the Continental United States. They have fought many wars here. They fought us all along because we said it’s ours and you haven’t got a right to it, and they fought us. Now you all are claiming that it’s yours under this illusionary concept of private ownership of property and they’re going to fight you. But they’re going to call it national security and energy crisis. They’re going to call it constitutional rights. And they’re going to call it judicial proceedings. They’re going to nationalize the police departments. That’s your military coup in the name of violence. Rise in crime. But all we must do is look in the corporate office and see the rising crime that is taking place there, and nobody’s going to jail for it.

So we got to understand that they are arming themselves to wage a war against us and it’s going to be called the War of Law and Order. Because they’re twisting it around. For five hundred years my people have resisted. For five hundred years we will resist again, if it becomes necessary.

We want to be able to relate and communicate with all of the people that are living on this land. But we want to be able to relate and communicate from a position of truth. You all got to face the truth. We have had to face it through five hundred years of genocide. We have had to face the truth. We have had to live the truth. We have had to die the truth, before we’re going to ever see our evolutionary liberation. The people that call themselves Americans are going to have to face the truth also. They tell us to be realistic. That progress means all these things have to happen. They tell us that we can’t go back to the old way. They tell us, be realistic. But there is no old way, no new way, there is a way of life. We must live in balance with the Earth. We must do it. We have no choice. If we allow ourselves to be apathetic or we allow ourselves to be lied to or tolerate their lies about what they are doing to the Earth, then we are betraying our intention. We are betraying our purpose here. We cannot protect that seventh generation if we do not protect the Earth. We cannot protect ourselves if we do not protect the Earth. The Earth gives us life, not the American government. The Earth gives us life, not the multi-national corporate government. The Earth gives us life. We need to have the Earth. We must have it. Otherwise our life will be no more. So we must resist what they do.

They want to break our spirit. They will do everything and anything to break our spirit, our will to live. We must learn to resist. We must learn to see. We must learn to look. We must learn to step out of this reactionaryism. All of our lives they’ve had control of us through their schools and through their TV, their electronic media. They’ they’ve had control of us all of our lives. They have programmed us. They have made us become reactionary. We don’t think. We react to what they do. We don’t think. We react to everything that they do. We react to it. They’re setting us up in the eighties because they know consistently throughout the past, the people have always reacted to their manipulations of circumstance. They know that the people always react. They’re counting on it in the eighties. And they outnumber us with guns. They outnumber us with money. They outnumber us with votes. They control all the machines that count the votes. They got it all stacked in their favor. Except there’s a key. The key is we must start thinking and stop reacting. The oppressor has no thinkers. They have no philosophers. It’s all scientific. It’s all economic. It’s all manipulative. They have no thinkers.

You go deal with the enemy, and what the enemy does is the enemy will send somebody out on the street to hit you in the head, and the guy says I’m only taking my orders. And if you can come from a position of strength, this guy that’s hitting you in the head and say hey you’ve got to stop hitting me in the head, we want to talk, then he says, Well, I have to go to my superior to see. They have no thinkers, either. If we will start to think and we will learn to see what reality really is, we will outnumber them through the thinking process. We will take our minds away from them. Because to their manipulation of our mind, they control our spirit. And they know this is true. They want us to believe that we are powerless. They want us to believe that we are becoming overwhelmed. That they can overwhelm us. But they are paranoid. They are more paranoid than any of us are, no matter what happens to us. Because see, they have to put people in here to come and listen to what we’re saying so they can go back and tell. So they’re afraid. They’re afraid because they know we’re talking about reality. Now, why are they afraid? They are afraid because they know that they are dealing with the illusions of power, which are based on the realities of violence and brutality. They don’t want people to think. They don’t want people to be talking. And they don’t want people to think about what they talk about. Because they know. They’ve known it all along that they’ve built their whole thing on illusions And because they have drawn us into giving this illusionary world all this power they have taken our power away from us, because we believe in the illusions.  It’s going to be real hard for us to get our way back. We have to deal with the economics. We have to deal with the politics. We have to deal with the whole nuclear madness. But we’re going to have to purify and cleanse our spirit a little bit, our resistance.

Movements. We have to think real seriously about movements. See movements make up a resistance. We have to be very careful how we organize, because they’re counting on us to react the same way we did in the sixties and the seventies. You think that this energy crisis, and you think that this economic inflation thing, you think it’s an accident? You think it just happened? They saw in the sixties that the American people were becoming more liberal because they were becoming more affluent. And because they were becoming more affluent, they were starting to say, well equal rights for the blacks. The young people are starting to say, well it doesn’t matter what you look like, we all have a worth. And then that led up to where everybody started saying the war in Vietnam is wrong. The other side. They saw that all of these conclusions were based on a level of affluency that was reaching the average American and the average American was becoming more liberalistic in their thinking because they were getting this affluency. So they’re getting even. They’ve had a redistribution of the wealth. They did it through energy, through oil, to make the people more poor. They did it. That’s what Watergate was all about. While everybody was looking at Richard Nixon and did he, or didn’t he, they had a redistribution of the wealth, and the price of gasoline and bread went up one hundred per cent. See now, if you didn’t have Nixon to look at and be concerned about, then maybe you all would not have allowed them to raise these prices. See, but by the time they got the prices raised by one hundred percent, it was too late for the American people to ever recover and deal with it. They’re getting even for the sixties and the seventies. Count on it. It’s not an accident.

You’ve got a racist class, sexist ruling class power structure that exist in the world and it’s composed of heavy industrialists, the people who are, part machine. And they’re going to keep their hold on world economics. We live in a machine world, an industrialized world. We got to deal with race. Two thirds of the world’s natural resources are on non-white land, because that’s where two thirds of the world population is. One third of the world’s resources, because of technology coming out of the white land, one third of the world’s resources are almost totally used up. But technology spreads like any disease, technology spreads, so this two-thirds with the majority of the world’s population, they got all the natural resources, so at some point in the immediate future they’re going to have all the technology, which makes them the new machine power. And it changes the whole thing around. But like they did to us when they wanted our land in the Dakotas, they used their technology to stay ahead. They came and they gave us a few Winchester repeating rifles because they had gatling guns. And then they could justify their murder see, because America, the hypocrisy, is they must arm you before they murder you. So that was how they went about it.

We look at today and now. By creating a dependency on nuclear power, nuclear energy. By creating a dependency upon that, there’s only a handful of countries that control the mechanism of mass production of this. All the countries in the world don’t. And you watch where the nuclear bombs are going. They’re going to places like Africa and the Middle East. And they’re going to give some of these people some bombs, and they’ll even have some of these people drop one of these atom bombs on each other one of these days. They can afford to hand the bombs out there because these nations have no capability of delivering the bomb back to where it came from, be it the Soviet Union or America.

They create a dependency on nuclear energy. Then everybody has to adjust their needs and we stay dependent. Then through the end of it, before it’s done, they intend to use their nuclear energy to be able to step into the Third World and take the natural resources. It’s all got to do with economics and racist power trips that have been in existence, since before Christ.

For us to survive and resist, we are going to have to understand and recognize that we are energy. Because we are a natural part of the creation. And if we are going to effectively stand up to our enemy, we’re going to have to be able to do it based upon our connection to the real truth. To reality. Our enemy is abusing the earth. Our enemy abuses us. Abuses all the sacred things of life. But we are an extension of the Earth. We are energy and we are spirit. Before we will be strong enough to fight and stand up to the enemy, we’re going to have to revaluate how we use our own energy. Are we misusing our own energy? Are we misusing ourselves? Because we’ve got to deal with that before we can deal with being misused by someone else. Alternative energy. We are alternative energy. We are it. We have power. We must gear ourselves for a long struggle. We must never give up hope. We must never turn our back and say we’re not going to make it. Because those who turn their back and say we’re not going to make it, then they’re not going to. That’s it for them. But the spirit of the people, the spirit of the people, the spirit of the earth. We live in a natural world. We go through lives. All of our ancestors who were here before us, all of our relations who were here with us and went into the Spirit world, they didn’t go to heaven or hell. They’re here. They’re spirit power. We connect with them. They will help us. They will help us to survive this thing. This madness that is coming, this machine madness that is being imposed upon all of us. What we must do is we must seriously think and consider our situation today as human beings. Because we’re talking about sexism and agism and racism and classes, and we’re talking about a nuclear attack against the Earth. We’re talking about a lot of things. They want to confuse us with nuclear bombs and want to confuse us with the draft. They want to confuse us with economics. But we must take a little bit of time every day anyway, and put some of that confusion to the side and think about who we are in relationship to the Earth. The Earth has the ability to heal and the Earth has the ability to help us. The Earth is power. We’re looking to the wrong source for our power, and the more we look to the wrong source, the more powerless we become. And they will attack. You take that flower power movement that was in the middle sixties. These were young white people coming out of middle America. And these were the ones that were saying, it doesn’t matter what you look like or how you dress or how much money you make. And they became a threat to America. So America attacked them. America attacked them with LSD and speed and heroine and drugs. America took them and discredited them and said, they’re no longer flower power children who come from your middle class homes. They are drug addicts. And they had a generation gap. But everybody was so caught up in mind expansionism and idealism, they said well the LSD’s a good thing for us and we really want it because it helps us to grow and see. But I consider it to be an act of war. The C.I.A. was experimenting with LSD specifically for that purpose, to use it in chemical warfare and they saw a whole segment of the American public was turning toward a consciousness that talked about true human life values. So they dropped their LSD bomb. Because mind expansion and consciousness alteration was taking place. That’s what the civil rights movement was. That’s what the flower power movement was. That’s what the anti-war movement was. It was people whose minds and their consciousness was expanding and starting to become more realistic. So they turned around and they dropped a few things on us to divert our energy.

So we have to be very careful. We must always think. We must always look to see, because there’s an answer for everything that is going on if we are willing to take the time to look for it and to see it. We are power. We are energy. We are spirit. We are the people. We want to be free. We want our liberation. Then we must take the responsibility that goes with liberation and freedom, and that responsibility is, to be able to take the time to analyze, to think and to feel things out to their logical conclusion. Stay with these things to the end, to the good conclusion. We cannot come and get involved in this for a year or two years. We must pick our way of life and we must live to it. And no matter how hard anybody here thinks that it is, think about all our relatives that are locked up in prison cells. Think about how hard it is for them. But they’re strong enough to endure. We’re out here. We should be strong enough to endure also. Think about all the women and children and, men, the people that have had to endure centuries and centuries of oppression. Strong enough to endure. We must do that. We must find a way to communicate with each other. We must find a way to have a more open human compassion. We must go back to the ways of the Earth. It’s the only way we’re going to protect the unborn. We must never quit. We must be resistance. We must build a resistance that passes on the information and the knowledge of our mistakes to the next generation. We must not become too movement oriented, where we get caught up in our own arrogance because we’re chasing a cause. We must build our power, And we must understand that we build strong. We must build to survive, not to change the politics right now, we must build to survive. Because pretty soon a lot of these conversations, they will not allow them to take place any more. There’s going to come a time in our lifetime, and many of us will see it, where we’re going to have to run to each other for safety. That time is coming. And anyone who refuses to believe it, anyone who still believes the American lie that it can’t happen here, then you have our sympathy, and we do not mean to offend you. Stay with us as long as you can, and when you see it start to happen then you make your decision.

And Reagan. Reagan’s not your enemy. He’s an actor. He’s saying the words that somebody is putting into his hands to say. He’s reading his script. And they got this thing well planned. And they intend to break the backbone of resistance in America and are going to do it under their so called energy crisis. I don’t know what the answers are or the solutions. We could pray. We could pray to the Earth and we could pray to the ways that we believe, and pray for some kind of understanding, and take a little bit of time to get to know ourselves and be comfortable with ourselves. Take a little time because the enemy has come into us. The enemy is inside of us. The enemy exploits our eagle. Exploits our needs and our wants. You know there are things in this world that we need to have to survive. And there are things in this world that we want because we want them. We are going to have to relearn the difference. We are going to have to learn to take what we need, even if it means giving up some of the excess that we want. We cannot give too much to a way of life. I thank you for your time.~