The Good Old Days



I’ve been reading John Tanner’s autobiography, The Falcon, (Download).  He was born in Kentucky in 1780.  At age 9, he was kidnapped by the Ojibwa, and adopted by an Ottawa chief.  Tanner spent 30 years living as a wild hunter-gatherer, wandering in the wilderness between the Red River of North Dakota and Lake Huron in Michigan.  He once tried to return to his birth family, but white society was intolerably creepy.

One day on the prairie, he met an odd fellow.  The stranger brought news of a Shawnee prophet who had a vision for a great healing.  Ever since the disease ridden, pale faced, radicalized Christian terrorists had washed up on the shores of Turtle Island, life had gotten ugly for Native Americans.  The terrorists, who seemed incapable of honesty, kept pushing the tribes westward, generating much tension and bloodshed.  At that time, the Sioux of the plains were pushing back hard against the unwanted immigrants displaced from their traditional lands in the east.  Nobody was happy.

Tanner listened to the prophet’s list of instructions.  Never allow your fire go out.  Let no dogs live.  Never steal, lie, strike others, get drunk, or go against your enemies.  If you follow these instructions, you will become invisible to the Sioux, and can live in peace.  A flashback slithered into my boggy old thinker.  This story sounded familiar.  Computer magic remembered my notes on Alvin Josephy’s book, 500 Nations, pages 305-306.  Bingo!  They read:

305 In Indiana in 1805, Lalawthika (the noise maker), an alcoholic brother of the heroic warrior Tecumseh, fell into a trance, and visited with the Creator in a vision.  306 He quit drinking and changed his name to Tenskwatawa, meaning “the open door.”  He was later known as the Prophet.  He preached to many tribes about declining morals and the need to return to traditional values.  They needed to reject Christianity and return to their old religion.  They should drop the selfishness, envy, and lust for possessions that the whites had taught them, and return to the way of sharing.  They should cast out of their lives domestic animals, woven clothes, and metal tools.

Upon reading this, a name farted out of my boggy old thinker: Donald Trump.  I was startled at this weird association, and then burst into a big smile.  This led to another flashback, a passage on the Ghost Dance I had written for What Is Sustainable.  Here’s a bit of it:

In the 1860’s, deranged Europeans rode their brand new railroads into the Great Plains and commenced the Buffalo Holocaust.  By 1890, the buffalo were at the brink of extinction.  For the Indians, the buffalo were the core of their existence.  With the buffalo gone, their traditional hunting life became obsolete and impossible.

In January 1889, a Paiute prophet named Wovoka had a vision.  He encouraged folks to perform the Ghost Dance.  They should gather and dance five days and four nights, then on the fifth day bathe in the river.  It was powerful dancing, with up to 500 in a large circle.  Many enjoyed manic frenzy, some fell into hypnotic trances, some collapsed and became unconscious.  The Ghost Dancing spread from tribe to tribe, eventually expanding over a vast region of the American west.

The vision was that if the Ghost Dance was properly performed, a great flood would come and wash the whites back across the ocean to their European home, where they belonged.  The ancestors and the buffalo would be reincarnated, the epidemics of white diseases would cease, and life would return to the good old days.

A different version of the Ghost Dance story, described by Lame Deer, used the metaphor of rolling up and disposing a filthy old carpet, which was a symbol for the white man’s world.  Imbedded in the filthy carpet were roads, mines, cities, farms, factories — every form of ugliness that civilization brought with it.  When the old carpet was rolled away, beneath it was revealed a healthy wild Fairyland — the land as it was prior to the invasion of the whites and their diseases.

The Ghost Dance became so popular that the white invaders began to get spooked.  They were intimidated by the fact that large numbers of Indians were enthusiastically dancing, with the goal of cleansing their lands of the white race forever.  They perceived (incorrectly) that the natives were conspiring to launch a violent rebellion.  The army was called, and several hundred Ghost Dancers were exterminated at Wounded Knee on December 29, 1890.

This story spurred the recall of another memory, an old rant on the vision of Nongqawuse, in South Africa.  Some snips:

When the Dutch Afrikaners (Boers) invaded the Eastern Cape region of South Africa, the Xhosa tribe fought them long and hard.  Beginning in 1779, eight bloody frontier wars were fought.  In 1806, the British replaced the Afrikaners and continued the struggle to conquer Xhosa land.  In 1853, a lung disease began killing off the Xhosa’s cattle herds.  Problems worsened when a severe drought hit.  Things started looking grim.

Then, in 1856, after decades of terrible struggles and misfortunes, an 11-year old Xhosa girl named Nongqawuse had a vision.  She communicated with spirits of the dead and they informed her that the colonist invasion was the result of their cattle having been cursed by witchcraft.  The spirits then gave her some important instructions in order to remedy this situation.

To lift this curse and return to days of peace and plenty, the living Xhosa had to do three things:  stop cultivating their fields, destroy their grain reserves, and kill all of their cattle.  If they did this, the whites would be driven into the sea, the dead would return, and they would refill the granaries, restore the crops in the fields, and bring herds of immortal cattle.

At this point, the Xhosa split into two groups, the believers and the non-believers.  In 1856 and 1857, the believers did as the ancestors instructed them.  They dumped their grain and slaughtered 400,000 cattle.  Having destroyed their food supply, tens of thousands then proceeded to die of starvation.  Tens of thousands were forced to go to towns and take oppressive low-paying jobs.  Only 37,000 remained on their lands, out of 105,000.  By the 1870s, white settlers occupied most of the Xhosa’s lands.  The surviving Xhosa were rounded up and moved to reserves in British Kaffraria.

Anyway, these stories emerged from cultures whose good old days were behind them, following bloody collisions with civilization.  The present was out of balance, miserable, a dead end.  It was time to perform big ceremonial magic, return to the traditional path, and live in peace and prosperity.

As I write in early 2017, Donald Trump is the new U.S. president.  His mantra is “Make America Great Again.”  It’s time for Americans to perform the Trump Dance, and restore the good old days of cheap and abundant oil, coal, iron, and timber, when men had good jobs, mothers stayed home to raise large families, minorities knew their place, and Kennedys boogied in the White House.

To return to the traditional path, we must expel the crazy, dangerous Mexicans and Muslims.  We must replace public schools with private religious schools, and graduate kids who are blissfully ignorant about evolution, climate change, and overshoot.  We must let the Reaper take the commoners, and reserve health care for people who matter.  We must eliminate all restrictions on loggers, miners, ranchers, and bankers so our wheezing economy can have one last screaming squirting orgasm of mindless destruction.

This time, it will work, by golly!

Image: “The Ghost Dance by the Oglala Lakota at Pine Ridge.”  Illustration by Frederic Remington, 1890.

Neither Wolf Nor Dog



One of the most tragic stories in human history describes the spread of civilization into the lands of the wild and free.  This story has countless variations, in every region of the world, and they rarely end happily, with the wild and free expelling the invaders.  Instead, what usually happened was that the civilized people proceeded to kill or enslave the natives, and then destroy the ecosystem, which eventually doomed the civilization.

In New England, the European invaders tried to transform the Indians into submissive, hard-working Christian farmers.  This plan enjoyed little success.  In the 19^th century, the strategy changed.  Indians were herded into concentration camps called reservations, or gunned down if they resisted.  The Indians were hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned.

The first wave of my Norwegian ancestors immigrated in 1879 and settled in the eastern regions of Iowa and North Dakota — recently the home of the Lakota and vast herds of bison.  This was three years after Custer was defeated at Little Big Horn, and eleven years before the last group of free Lakota was exterminated at Wounded Knee.  The world would be a happier place today if everyone had stayed at home, spent time with therapists working through their superiority and domination complexes, developed effective family planning systems, and learned how to live in harmony with their land.

Kent Nerburn’s book, Neither Wolf Nor Dog, presents the Lakota perspective on the European invasion, as seen through the eyes of “Dan,” a 78 year old elder (1913-2002).  It’s a perspective that white folks are rarely exposed to, unfortunately.  Dan had many important ideas that he wanted to pass along to the younger generations of all peoples, and Nerburn compiled them into a book.  The format of the oratory was very laid back — riding around Indian country in an old Buick with two elders, a big dog, and a cloud of cigarette smoke.

Dan was a traditional Lakota who had no affection for white government, white religion, or white people.  He had been angry all his life at what the whites had done to his land and his people.  The conquest provided no benefits for the Lakota, it was a complete disaster, a toxic explosion of greed, craziness, and injustice.  Yet white historians described the conquest in glowing terms — brave pioneers conquering and civilizing an untamed wilderness — progress!  God bless America!

The perspective in Lakota country could not be more different.  In their eyes, the conquest of America resembled something like the 2011 tsunami of east Japan that erased everything in its path.  The bison were exterminated, the forests were eliminated, the prairies were plowed, and contagious disease killed millions.  They shot the buffalo just to kill them!  They had no respect for the land or the beings that lived there.

When Indians killed “innocent” white settlers, the whites howled about barbaric savages and bloody massacre.  But the Indians had little choice.  The invaders intended to completely erase Indian society, even if this included exterminating every Indian.  The whites relentlessly advanced.  The soldiers were young men who had been hired to kill the “animals” that stood in the path of empire, and many of them took pleasure in killing.  There was no possibility of negotiation, because the invaders broke every agreement they made.  There was nowhere to flee to.  Surrender promised cultural obliteration. 

For the whites, the land was not alive and sacred — it was a treasure to be seized and exploited as quickly as possible.  The Lakota saw the land as their sacred mother, and they treated her with great respect.  Dan could never understand why, despite their good treatment, mother had gotten angry and punished the Lakota with invasion, diseases, and harsh winters.  Dan wondered what she had in store for the whites, who have shown no respect whatsoever.  We’ll surely find out.

One day, Nerburn drove Dan through his village on the reservation, an impressive scene of rundown houses, junk cars, and trash.  White people typically drive through and perceive nothing but “a bunch of shit.”  Dan asked Nerburn what he thought Indians saw when they visited a white city.  “We say the same thing.”  “You see a dirt path with a pop can next to it and you think that is worse than a big paved highway that is kept clean.  You get madder at a forest with a trash bag in it than at a big shopping center…”

White people are fascinated with the idea of freedom, because they have so little freedom in their lives.  Dan saw that whites are confined in a world of cages — their fenced property, their permanent home, their rulers, their bosses, their laws, their religious beliefs.  Indians have always enjoyed great freedom, and they had no desire to become farmers and join the whites in their world of miserable cages. 

This is why the whites had Sitting Bull murdered.  He didn’t want to sign treaties, because that would turn his people into blanket Indians.  They would turn white.  Sitting Bull said “I do not wish to be shut up in a corral.  All agency Indians I have seen were worthless.  They are neither red warriors nor white farmers.  They are neither wolf nor dog.”

After Sitting Bull was gunned down, many of his people fled to Wounded Knee, with soldiers in pursuit.  The weather was frigid, but they didn’t dare make fires, fearing that they would be discovered.  They were cold, hungry, and weak when the soldiers caught them.  The Indians were disarmed, then all of them were mowed down with machine guns — men, women, children, and the elderly.

The climax of the story came when Dan and Nerburn spent a night at the Wounded Knee cemetery, in a realm of powerful spirits.  Throughout his life, Dan had remained in close contact with the spirits of his ancestors.  The invasion had filled his life with pain, rage, and sorrow.  The injustice was unbearable.  Why did the Creator allow this to happen?  His ancestors had died running. 

Dan prayed for healing.  He was sure that the passage of generations would eventually bury the anger.  Peace would eventually return.  This is a book I will never forget.

 

Kent Nerburn, Neither Wolf Nor Dog, New World Library, Novato, California, 1994.  Due to popular demand, Nerburn wrote a second book about Dan, The Wolf at Twilight (2009).

A 2017 Interview with Nerburn (HERE)

Neither Wolf Nor Dog movie trailer (HERE)