Remembering John Trudell

John Trudell has passed to the other side on December 8, 2015.  He was a Santee Sioux activist and a spoken word artist.  Trudell had a profound influence on my thinking.  Over the years, I’ve stashed away a collection of information about him.  The following is a sampler.

EXHIBIT ONE

Trudell, Appaloosa Pictures, 2005, directed by Heather Rae, starring John Trudell.  This is a full-length documentary about John Trudell, very well done.  It’s available on YouTube.  The commercial DVD includes additional material.

Trudell:  The spirit of life is almost nonexistent in the perceptional reality of the society that we’re in.  It’s almost nonexistent.  They got religion, they got civilization, they got military, they got politics, education.  They got all the stuff.  They don’t have the spirit to live.

EXHIBIT TWO

“Crazy Horse, We Hear What You Say” is an essay that Trudell wrote, which was used as the introduction to Of Earth and Elders, by Serle L. Chapman, Mountain Press, Missoula, Montana, 2002.  It’s a clear and strong five page summary of his perception of reality.  Here are a few snips:

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.  <snip>

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 extreme forms on an Indian reservation — the loneliness, alcoholism, drug abuse and violence — is being replicated more and more throughout industrial society.  <snip>

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.  <snip>

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.

EXHIBIT THREE

Rezamerica in the Shade of Blue — A Conversation With John Trudell by Ben Corbett.  This interview went extinct online.

Corbett:  And that means taking responsibility?

Trudell:  That’s exactly right.  That spiritual reality is based upon responsibility.  Religious realities are not spiritual.  The religious reality that exists in these technolgic industrial perceptions are not about responsibility, they’re about authoritarianism and guilt and sin and blame, domination and submission.  They’re not about responsibility.  Look at the situation and condition that the world is in and you can tell that they’re not about responsibility.  They accumulate wealth, they create their own authoritarian systems, they use their authoritarian systems and accumulated wealth to influence economic and political decisions that get made.  They use their resources, they use their authority and accumulated wealth to influence military decisions that get made.  Every behavior they have is really and truly not about responsibility.  <snip>

Corbett:  In other words, by being authoritarian, what you do is you take the responsibility away from the people and then the people feel there’s no need to take responsibility because somebody else is doing it for them?

Trudell:  Well they feel disconnected.  They don’t really know what the meaning of responsibility is.

Corbett:  Do you think that’s one of the biggest challenges facing the human race?

Trudell:  Yeah, actually I do.  It may be the biggest one.  Becoming reconnected to reality.  <snip>

Corbett:  What do you think it’s gonna mean for the future?

Trudell:  That’s still to be decided.  Because when we look at the non-native people here, remember they all came from tribes.  And the civilizing process took that memory away from them.  So it happened 3000 years ago.  Now we’ve been put into that same process, but we’ve been in it for 500 years.  So if we can keep our identity, our spiritual identity, if we can keep our identity as human beings, then we’ll be okay.  But if we can’t keep that identity, then we’ll go the way of the descendants of the tribes of Europe.  The future will be decided by what kind of coherency we pass to the next generation.  <snip>

EXHIBIT FOUR

This interview with WOJB’s Lori Townsend took place on February 28, 1998, before Trudell performed in concert in Kyle, South Dakota, part of the 25th Anniversary of Wounded Knee. 

Townsend:  I know that people have said, this is to commemorate a time of healing, from that time when there was a lot of division.  People were separated by the very nature of the struggle.  What have you seen in 25 years, as people come together, being able to heal from that time?

Trudell:  (laughs) That’s a hard one to answer.  I think we’ve learned more.  And I think that learning is the healing itself.  In pragmatic, practical terms, there are still personality differences and political differences that different individuals have.  So on one level, it doesn’t look like it’s been healed.  But on another level, we can all come back into one environment together and be together.  Whatever our opinions and attitudes are, they don’t get in the way of us all being together.  That’s like, there is some type of healing that has taken place.  But I’ve never really approached it myself so much from the healing aspect, as the survivor’s aspect.  Here’s who survived, here’s who still standing.

I look at it like that.  I think healing, in a way, is an individual process.  It has to happen in an individual before it can happen in a community.

Again, if we learn from our experiences, then we have more knowledge.  To me, that’s always essential to healing — knowledge and understanding.  Very essential.  But on the other hand, you can’t have real healing if one does not look within themselves and start that healing process.  <snip>

Townsend:  Well, how should people pick their battles now?  As you said, if you get too involved in politics, you become a politician.

Trudell:  I said you can get involved in politics, but you don’t have to be a politician.  It’s a mental thing.  People start working on political issues and then, at some point, they say, “I’m a political activist,” and that becomes their identity; that’s where the problem comes.

The question you started to ask, whatever it is that we have to do, how we’re going to approach it, I think we should think it out.  Look at it from every direction.  It’s almost as if we’re stepping out of our minds, out of ourselves, and looking at the whole thing, with us in it, as neutrally and as objectively as we can.  That way we’ll have some clarity to go after it as clearly as we can, rather than emotionally, or limited by these identities that we impose on ourselves around an issue.

It’s going to take clarity to see our way through these things, to the future that is coming.

It is in our best interest to use our intelligence intelligently.  But we don’t do that enough; 99.9 percent of us use our intelligence to manifest our fears, and our insecurities on a daily basis.  <snip>

Townsend:  What can be done?  It sounds too bleak.

Trudell:  I don’t look at it as bleak.  I think it’s best to recognize reality for what it is.

What did I say about the cannibals?  Let’s recognize that reality for what it is and the reality of who we are.  We have intelligence.  We have spirit.  We have the ability to think our way through this.  I think it’s more optimistic to see how dark it really is, and know what reality is, and then I won’t be fooling myself about what I must do.

Wouldn’t it be better to understand that if I’m going to do something, I’m not going to lie to myself about what I’m doing, whether it’s glorious or ugly.  I’m not going to fix it up, romanticize it, or make it clean.  If I’m doing it, I’m going to be as honest about it as I possibly can.  If I can’t live with it, then I stop.  If I lie to myself, then I’ll find ways to live with it and continue to do it.  That obstructs our clarity.

Always tell ourselves the truth.  Learn from mistakes.  Don’t judge ourselves.  We’re not in the judging business.  Trust our ability.  If we use our intelligence as coherently as we can, we will create the solutions.

If we go back in our history, our ancestral understanding, we always understood we had a purpose to be here.  That purpose is to take care of life the best we can.  What has changed is the harshness of the environment.  It was hard, not romantic back then.

The hard now is the predatory civilization that surrounds us.  Our ancestors trusted themselves, they respected themselves.  Pride today is the mask people hide behind when they feel no respect for themselves.

Trust ourselves.  Like ourselves.  I like myself.  I always don’t like what I do.  There is no collective solution without an individual solution.

The darkest thing I see for the future is all these people that are hoping and wishing and don’t want to see what’s coming.  That’s the darkness.  But they say they are bringing light and being optimistic, but to me these people are the ones bringing the darkness because they don’t want to deal with reality.  These are the ones who will perish.  These are the ones that will be fed upon and eaten up.

If one really thinks about it, we can romanticize being here before the white man came.  We were free, we could do what we wanted, we had responsibilities, but I tell you what, you see the storm we’re having right now.  It was hard surviving back then.  So this is just a different hard.  These cannibals are just a different hard.  But they can be dealt with.

I think if we really understand self-respect, we would look at this and say, “this is the challenge and I’m up to meeting it.”

EXHIBIT FIVE

Protecting the Earth — An interview with John Trudell by John Bowling, Earth First! Journal, May 1, 1998.  This interview went extinct online.

Bowling:  The new generation of EF! activists are arguing over whether or not nonviolence is the most expedient strategy for the movement.  People are discussing whether or not it would be appropriate right now to employ more self-defensive, possibly even violent means of defending the Earth.  What effects do you think that would have on the movement?

Trudell:  I think we need to have an understanding of what violence is because a great many people say they are against violence, yet they live off of the fruits of violence...  We live within systems that are violent.  We live in excess.  We are part of an excessive consuming society.  That’s the result of violence against the Earth…  The reality is that even though we say we are against violence, we still consume the products of violence against the Earth.  Anytime that we have more than we need, anytime that we live a life that we are consuming all we want, especially in the material sense, then we are perpetuating violence.

Bowling:  You’re familiar with Gandhi’s work and the civil rights movement.  What then is your opinion of Gandhian-style non-cooperation?

Trudell:  Gandhi was operating in a different situation than here.  So, I think that there are elements of what he was doing that work here.  But, what Gandhi did in India is not going to work here because this isn’t India.  We aren’t Gandhi.  But, I think lessons can be learned.  I think it is really about non-cooperation in the long run.

Say it became Earth First!’s objective, on behalf of the Earth, as a means of raising environmental awareness, to organize on one agreed upon day that we didn’t spend any money.  We went to work.  We did whatever else it is we do...  but we don’t spend any money.  Look on a national level and try to get 25 percent of the population to do it.  Everything we do violently or nonviolently is feeding into the economic system.  We’re attacking the issues but we’re not dealing with the reality of what’s behind the issues and that is the economic system.

Let’s say 25 percent of the population is involved...  That would add up to incredible number that would affect the daily economic reality...  You look at the economic system.  It is in such a fine line balance anyway.  If people would just one day say, “Hold on, I’m not going to consume,” then they would really understand what kind of power they have in this society, which goes way beyond the power of the vote.  I think it could be accomplished...  There doesn’t have to be any party line, no one idea that is prevalent other than protecting the Earth, standing fast with the Earth.  It’s a fast for her.  If somebody’s issue is the river or if somebody’s issue is the trees or if somebody’s issue is toxic waste, they can still talk those issues...  To me it goes into the area of non-cooperation.  It’s not about violence or nonviolence or obedience or civil disobedience.  We just won’t cooperate.

EXHIBIT SIX

My first blog about Trudell was posted in 2013: HERE.  There are many videos of Trudell on YouTube.  His recordings are for sale at his website.

Wisdom Sits in Places

Wal-Mart, McDonalds, Shell, Safeway, the highway matrix — everyone knows these culturally significant features of our landscape.  Less well known are the natural features of the land: the hills, prairies, ponds, and streams.  Our landscape watched the mammoths roam, it watched the furious madness of civilization, and it will watch the manmade eyesores dissolve into ancient ruins.

Waking up in the civilized world each morning is a jolt — jets, sirens, the endless rumble of machines.  Most of us live amidst hordes of two-legged tumbleweeds, nameless strangers.  We are the people from nowhere, blown out of our ancestral homelands by the howling winds of ambition and misfortune.  Our wild ancestors never lived here.  Carson McCullers wrote, “To know who you are, you have to have a place to come from.”

Pssst!  Over here!  I’ve found the entrance to another realm, a temporary place of refuge, an escape from the madness.  It’s called Wisdom Sits in Places, and it was written by Keith Basso (1940-2013), an ethnographer-linguist.  In 1959, he began spending time in the Apache village of Cibecue, in Arizona.  He discovered a culture that had deep roots in the land, and a way of living that was far from insane.

The Apache culture also had entrances to other realms.  Many places on their land had names, and many of these named places were associated with stories, and many of these stories had ancient roots.  Everyone in Cibecue knew the named places, and their stories.  The voices of the wild ancestors could be heard whenever the stories were told, and their words were always conveyed in the present tense.  “Now we are in for trouble!”  Past and present swirled together.

The stories were a treasure of time-proven wisdom.  They often provided moral messages that taught the virtues of honorable living, and the unpleasant rewards of poor choices.  When people wandered off the good path, stories reminded them of where this would lead.  They helped people to live well.  Because of the power in the stories, the natives said, “The land looks after the people.” 

Most scholars who spend time learning about other cultures were raised in the modern world of nowhere.  These experts would study languages, ceremonies, food production, clothing, spirituality, and so on — but they paid too little attention to the relationship between culture and place, because this notion was absent in their way of knowing.  Often, the reports they published were missing essential components.

From 1979 to 1984, Basso worked on a project that blew his mind.  The Anglo world had zero respect for sacred places when there was big money to be made.  But natives didn’t want their sacred places destroyed, so they hired experts to document their culturally significant sites.  Elders took Basso to see these places, and record their stories.  He created a map that covered 45 square miles, and had 296 locations with Apache place names.

Ruth Patterson told Basso about her childhood in the 1920s and 1930s.  In those days, families spent much time on the land, away from the village.  They herded cattle, tended crops, roasted agave, and hunted.  As they moved about, parents taught their children about the land.  They pointed out places, spoke their names, and told the stories of those places.  They wanted their children to be properly educated.

Apaches used historic stories for healing purposes.  Nothing could be more impolite than directly criticizing another person, expressing anger, or providing unrequested advice.  Instead, the elders used stories to “shoot” healing notions.  During a conversation, they would mention the names of places having stories that would be good for the wayward person to remember.  Then, hopefully, he or she would reflect on the stories, understand their relevance, and make the changes needed to return to balance.

One time, three wise women sat with a woman who was too sad.  The first wise woman spoke a sentence that mentioned a place name.  Then the second mentioned another place.  So did the third.  The sad woman recalled mental pictures of those places, and heard the ancestors’ voices speak the stories of those places.  She reflected on their meanings, and the clouds lifted.  She laughed.  This was a gentle, effective, and brilliant act of healing.  They called it “speaking with names.” 

One day, Dudley Patterson was talking about stories and wisdom.  Basso asked him, “What is wisdom?”  Patterson replied, “It’s in these places.  Wisdom sits in places.”  In a long and beautiful passage, he told Basso how his grandmother explained the pursuit of wisdom.  Everyone is different.  Some are smart, some are half-smart, but only a few achieve wisdom.  Wisdom is acquired via a long dedicated quest; no one is born with it.

When elders become wise, people can see them change.  They are calm and confident.  They are not fearful, selfish, or angry.  They keep promises.  They pay careful attention, always listening for the voices of the ancestors.  Patterson’s grandmother summed it up something like this:

“Wisdom sits in places.  It’s like water that never dries up.  You need to drink water to stay alive, don’t you?  Well, you also need to drink from places.  You must remember everything about them.  You must learn their names.  You must remember what happened at them long ago.  You must think about it and keep on thinking about it.  Then your mind will become smoother and smoother.  Then you will see danger before it happens.  You will walk a long way and live a long time.  You will be wise.  People will respect you.”

Years later, when Basso sat down to write his book, Cibecue had changed.  The road to the village had been paved, and there was a school, supermarket, medical clinic, and many new houses.  Big screen televisions were a new source of stories, sent from the spirit world of corporations, not ancestors.  People were spending far less time wandering about, old trails had grown over, and the younger generations were losing their connection to the land and its old-fashioned stories.  They preferred the new and useful information provided at school.

So, the book invites us to contemplate a society far different from our own.  It calls up ancient memories.  Everyone’s wild ancestors once lived in a way something like the Apaches.  It’s inspiring to remember this.  Observing the world from a tribal perspective allows us to realize how far we’ve strayed.  The people from nowhere are paying a terrible price for the frivolous wonders of modernity, and the wreckage it leaves behind.

Basso wrote, “We are, in a sense, the place-worlds we imagine.”  Prince Charles said it a bit differently:  “In so many ways we are what we are surrounded by, in the same way as we are what we eat.”  In the traditional Apache world, the people were surrounded by a beautiful culture that encouraged respect, caring, and wisdom.  In the modern consumer world, we’re surrounded by a wisdom-free nightmare of hurricane-force infantile energy reminiscent of a Godzilla movie.  But all hurricanes die.  Our Dark Age will pass.  Think positive!

Basso, Keith H., Wisdom Sits in Places, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1996.

Searching For Identity and Purpose

Once upon a time, Carl Jung said, “I am not what happened to me, I am what I chose to become.”  He understood his calling, the special role that was unique to his existence.  He consciously pursued it, and he spent his life on a path of powerful healing.

James Hillman was one of Jung’s apprentices.  Hillman did not believe that newborns came into this world as blank slates.  He saw infants as unique acorns, ready to spend their lives growing into unique oaks.  Every oak tree had a different form.  No two were identical.  The form of the tree was influenced by the information stored in the acorn from which it sprouted.

Hillman believed that every human acorn had unique characteristics, and a unique calling, purpose, or destiny.  Every person had a sacred obligation to understand that calling and live it.  This was why nature-based societies encouraged people to discover their calling via vision quest ceremonies.  When they found their vision, they knew their path and purpose.  This helped them avoid wasting their lives in aimless wandering.

Basil Johnston described how vision quests worked in Ojibway culture.  Once a person discovered his or her vision, they tried hard to live in accordance with it.  It was not uncommon for folks to periodically stray from their vision, or betray it, and “such a state was tantamount to non-living in which acts and conduct had no quality.”  Every year, men and women would go on a retreat, to verify that they were still living in synch with their vision, and make any needed adjustments.

Hillman believed that modern society was a train wreck because most people were clueless about their calling, and were wandering aimlessly.  Society fed the sacred acorns into a machine that crushed them, shredded them, and converted them into standard issue industrial robots and recreational shoppers — lost souls.

On a larger scale, it’s not hard to imagine that entire communities were once guided by a collective tribal vision, before agriculture arrived.  Each wild community inhabited a unique ecosystem, and its custom-tailored vision enabled it to live in balance with the land.  This vision was passed from generation to generation, across vast spans of time, and helped to keep the life of the tribe stable and secure.  The vision guiding the human community was in harmony with the vision of the community of life — they were the same.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is with sincere regret that I must inform you that industrial civilization has no sacred vision to guide it; it has a terminal illness.  In ages past, as civilization obliterated countless wild tribes, the visions of those tribes were forgotten.  Because of this, our society has descended into “a non-living state, and our acts have no quality.”  We are no longer like happy tadpoles or maggots, the beautiful offspring of a healthy wild ecosystem.  We have been reduced to lonely stressed-out cogs in a global economy.

What can we do?  Is it possible to remember what was lost?  Native Americans have told me yes, it is.  If you forget your instructions, just look back toward the Creator’s fire, and you’ll remember them.  But each tribe was given different instructions by the Creator.

White folks are not like tribal Indians.  We’re mongrels, having ancestors from numerous tribes, all now disintegrated or extinct.  If I have ancestors from 476 tribes, who am I?  What are my instructions?  Where is my home?  Who are my people?

If my wild ancestors were buried in 476 different lands, and all of those ecosystems have been obliterated by centuries of civilization, what good are the ancient instructions?  The aurochs are gone, the lions are gone, the forests are gone, and the salmon have been herded into concentration camps. 

The stories, songs, and ceremonies of my wild ancestors have all been lost.  Indians disagree.  They insist that all ancient wisdom is always “accessible,” and just wink when I ask how.  This is most perplexing!  I’m hoping that contemplating a sustainable future will open new doors of perception, or old ones.

I’ve lived in nine states, and my extended family is scattered everywhere.  We have become wandering homeless people.  This year, I’m living in the Willamette Valley, on land violently stolen from the Kalapuya.  As a people, the Kalapuya had never forgotten their vision.  They celebrated their lives in a paradise of abundant life, and they knew how to live in balance with it.  It was easy.  All they had to do was to carefully follow the path of the ancestors, the ancient time-proven vision of the community.

The Kalapuya were forced out of their home by the white invaders, who had strayed far from their ancestral home, and had no vision for living in harmony.  The invaders built the city that I live in, which is insane, and is in the process of committing suicide.  It has no spiritual connection to the land, or to life.  Indeed, the entire nation is lost and insane.  This is not encouraging.

Today, the invaders’ culture is a childlike fantasy world of gadget worshippers — robot-driven electric cars, smart highways, smart grids, high-speed trains, Internet everything, windmills and solar panels, and on and on — nothing sustainable, and nothing that is necessary for a healthy and enjoyable life.

The purpose of existence is to make lots of money, by any means necessary, and spend it in a manner that continuously increases your display of personal status, as defined by the ever-changing fads of consumer society.  Stan Rowe perceived that consumers were raging narcissists, spellbound by their own image, imprisoned in an introspective cage — too much time spent before the mirror, and far too little outdoors with the family of life.

Countless millions devote their entire lives to acquiring and discarding unnecessary stuff.  Consumers have a deep longing to experience inner peace and happiness in their lives, and they believe that shopping is the sacred path.  They are trying to fill the vacuum created by their loss of wildness and freedom.  But, no matter how skillfully they shop, or how much they spend, it never works, except for fleeting post-purchase consumer orgasms, soon followed by a return to gnawing hollowness.  Trainloads of Prozac numb the pain.

I can’t get off the bus and live like a Kalapuya.  The deer, elk, and salmon are mostly gone now, replaced by endless herds of automobiles and cell phone zombies.  The land has been chopped up into thousands of parcels of private property, where my presence is not welcome.  In this reality, a sustainable way of life is impossible.

John Trudell says that we cannot have a spiritual connection to the future if we have lost the connection to our past.  It’s essential that we remember that everyone has ancestors who were tribal people — admirable folks who were solidly connected to the circle of life, and lived in harmony with it. 

We are, at root, tribal people who have been colonized.  Colonization is a component of the spiritual disease that gave birth to domestication.  It’s a mindset devoted to a mining way of life, eating up tomorrow, for no honorable purpose.  At the core of our healing process is decolonizing our minds, remembering that we are wild tribal people — human beings — not miners.

John Trudell

On the night of January 3, 1994, I was sitting in my kitchen while a Lake Superior blizzard howled outside.  A program on the radio was broadcasting a talk recently given at Michigan Tech by John Trudell, a Santee Dakota artist, activist, and visionary.  This man had an extra-ordinary mind, and it seized my complete attention.  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.  It’s so rare and precious to experience powerfully clear thinking.  Last week, 19 years later, I finally saw him in person, at the University of Oregon.  It was good.

Trudell comes from a culture with an oral tradition, and he prefers the energy of live performances to sitting alone writing.  He once carefully summarized his core philosophy in a five-page introduction he wrote for the book Of Earth and Elders.  The documentary film Trudell does a memorable job of presenting the story of his life.  He has created a number of CDs of spoken word poetry, and he is the venerated subject of many webpages and videos.  The following paragraphs provide a sampler of his ideas.

John often introduces himself to an audience by announcing that he is crazy.  The form of reality that our society considers “sane” and “normal” is way too weird, and he refuses to jump on that wacky bandwagon.  He’s the opposite of normal, and he’s proud of it.  If you don’t agree with him, it’s OK, he’s crazy.

All human beings are descendants of tribal people who were spiritually alive, intimately in love with the natural world, children of Mother Earth.  When we were tribal people, we knew who we were, we knew where we were, and we knew our purpose.  This sacred perception of reality remains alive and well in our genetic memory.  We carry it inside of us, usually in a dusty box in the mind’s attic, but it is accessible.

Like every other region on Earth, the vast ancient forests of Europe were once home to many tribal peoples, folks who loved eating salmon and buffalo.  They had a spiritual connection to their past and to their land.  Unfortunately, the tribes of Europe were blindsided when hordes of Indo-European farmers invaded from the east, unleashing a tsunami of genocide. 

The process of erasing their tribal memories began about 3,000 years ago.  During the 500 years of the Inquisition (1250-1750), much of what had survived of the indigenous culture of old Europe was eliminated, as countless traditional people were tortured and burned alive (at least 100,000 to 2 million).

The perpetrators of this mass murder were predators who were deranged by a highly contagious spiritual disease that had nothing to do with race or culture.  This malady lived in the mind, and it altered their perception of reality.  As the Inquisition was winding down, many of these infected predators boarded ships and sailed to colonies in the Americas, where they terrorized the indigenous people for centuries.  They were incredibly brutal people, because they were the offspring of a brutal, disease-ravaged civilization.

Trudell doesn’t hate Europeans for what they have done — you can’t be mad at people because they are infected with a disease.  The invaders didn’t understand what they were doing, but they were spiritually responsible for their acts of genocide.  They were pathologically paranoid, and could not tolerate the existence of people who thought in a different way.  They were empty, lost, and afraid.  They had forgotten what it meant to be human beings. 

We are all human beings.  “Human” is our physical form, the bones, flesh, and blood which are made from the minerals, fluids, and gases of the living world.  “Being” is our spiritual component, our link to the power of the universe.  All things on Earth, animate and inanimate, are spiritually alive.

The disease of technological society has damaged our perception of reality, and pulled us away from our power.  We are constantly bombarded by inputs that insist that we are inadequate, undesirable, and unlovable.  They grind away our self-respect, and reduce us to weak domesticated organisms — things to be controlled and exploited like livestock.

The disease poisons our spirits with feelings of sin, guilt, and shame.  We don’t trust ourselves, or respect ourselves.  We have no spiritual relationship to the future, and that’s insane.  We are robbing our children to satisfy frivolous wants and needs.  Each person is responsible for the violence perpetuated by the consequences of their purchases. 

Our power resides in our connection to the Earth, our ability to think clearly, and our refusal to believe the illusions and deceptions of the oppressors.  The foundation of our power is caring, respect, and responsibility.  Learning is the path to healing, and learning begins with clear and coherent thinking.  No medicine is more powerful than intelligence — if intelligence is used intelligently. 

The environmental movement has had little success, because they tend to remain chained to the consumer mindset, riding in different coaches on the same train as the corporate folks.  Progressives often spin their wheels because they tend to focus on the redistribution of wealth, not the protection of the Earth.  Their complaints present no real threat to the industrial ruling class.  

Trudell has zero respect for the political system of the industrial predators.  Their government is a tool that’s useless for the pursuit of liberation and healing.  He feels that the most effective way of expressing our truths is via culture and art, which is why he focuses on spoken word poetry.  “All we can do is speak our truths.  We can’t go and try to change people.  We have to speak our truths.” 

Trudell is not a fan of revolution — kill the killers.  The root of the word “revolution” is revolve.  If you begin with hatred for an oppressor, revolution will bring you around to a new oppressor, and nothing is gained.  Instead of revolution, we should seek liberation from a sick value system.  He has no quick and simple solutions to offer, because our problems are anything but simple.

Whites can’t heal themselves by imitating Native American spirituality.  They need to explore their ancestry, and learn about their tribal origins.  They need to remember who they are, and reconnect with their ancestral culture, and this is a lifelong learning process.  But most of them don’t want to know about their past.  Most of them know nothing about their great grandparents.  They prefer to pursue spiritual shortcuts, because shortcuts take far less effort than walking the long and difficult path to genuine understanding, to remembering, to healing.

Protecting the Earth is at the core of what we must do.  We are what power is truly about.  “We have to assume our responsibilities as power, as individuals, as spirit, as people.”  But first, we’ve got to like ourselves, accept ourselves.  “We are the Human Beings.  We are the land.” 

Trudell, John, “Crazy Horse, We Hear What You Say,” the Introduction for Of Earth and Elders by Serle L. Chapman, Mountain Press, Missoula, Montana, 2002.

Trudell, Appaloosa Pictures, 2005, directed by Heather Rae, starring John Trudell.

www.johntrudell.com