The Falcon



For almost the entire human saga, our ancestors were hunter-gathers.  For most of us, these kinfolk are long forgotten in family memory.  Quite a bit has been written about wild societies by visiting outsiders from civilization, strangers who could not fully understand the cultures of their subjects.  The Falcon is the autobiography of John Tanner, a fascinating book that gives readers a ringside seat at a wild society, prior to conquest, from the viewpoint of an insider.

Tanner was a white lad born about 1780, in frontier Kentucky, not far from Cincinnati, Ohio.  At the age of 9, he was captured by the Shawnee and taken to Saginaw, Michigan, where he was treated harshly for two years.  Then, up at Mackinaw, an Ottawa woman, who had lost her son, bought him for 20 gallons of whiskey, blankets, tobacco, and other treasures.  He was given a name that meant “the falcon.”

Tanner was a rough, tough, honest man who endured an incredibly difficult life.  He lived among the Ottawa and Ojibwa people from roughly 1790 to 1820, and spent this period hunting, trapping, fishing, and defending himself from a variety of angry and violent folks.  He traveled thousands of miles by foot, canoe, and horseback through a vast wilderness.  His saga mentions visits to Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan; Pembina, North Dakota; Lake of the Woods, Ontario; and Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba.

This story takes place in an era of bloody helter-skelter, when the traditional way of life was seriously assaulted, and beginning to disintegrate.  Disease ridden, pale faced terrorists had landed on the east coast, and their infectious pathogens spread to distant regions of the interior, killing enormous numbers of natives.  Terrorists were beginning to settle on the frontier.  Tanner’s parents had moved west from Virginia, stupidly planning to acquire prime real estate in an extremely dangerous wilderness.

In that era, many New England tribes had become heavily dependent on agriculture.  Corn produced far more food per acre than forest, leading to increased population density and conflict.  Diana Muir described how corn quickly depleted the soil, requiring ongoing deforestation to clear new fields.  When the devastating epidemics arrived, tribes had been on an unsustainable trajectory to run out of forest that was suitable for cropland.  Corn helped the Iroquois become a dominant power, and their aggressive expansion forced other Algonquin tribes to flee westward.

At the same time, the fur trade was a booming, and there was intense competition for pelts.  Many traders were lying, cheating, racist creeps.  Industrial scale trapping drove the beavers close to extinction in eastern regions, so traders and trappers had to keep moving westward.

As eastern tribes were forced westward by warfare, settlers, and the quest for pelts, they put growing pressure on the fierce Sioux tribes of the prairies, who were not amused.  Tanner spent a lot of time in hot zones close to Sioux country, where he was in constant danger of losing his scalp.

The Sioux hated Tanner and his tribe for trespassing.  Because Tanner was the offspring of terrorists, many of his Indian companions and family were wary of him — terrorists were often whirlwinds of evil spirits.  Several times, they tried to kill him.  Finally, the terrorists hated him because he looked like a savage, thought like a savage, and spoke a savage tongue.  He once made an effort to return to his kinfolk in Christian society, but he didn’t belong in that bizarre world, and kept catching fevers.

Indians were tolerant of gender-benders.  On a visit to Leech Lake, Minnesota, Tanner met the son of a chief who was an A-go-kwa — “one of those who make themselves women, and are called women by the Indians.  There are several of this sort among most, if not all the Indian tribes.”  The A-go-kwa was about 50-years old, and had lived with many husbands.

The central theme of the book is the endless struggle to survive.  Starvation was a primary threat, and getting food was job #1.  Mike Culpepper wrote an essay on Tanner’s life, including a description of his diet:  “Tanner hunts bear, buffalo, moose, but also eats muskrat, rabbit, beaver, porcupine, otter and other animals trapped for their fur, and, when game is not available, his dogs, horses, and scraps of leather.  He eats ducks, geese, blackbirds, and swan.  He fishes for sturgeon, dory, and unnamed small fish that are eaten by the handful.  He consumes corn, wild rice, and berries.”  Yum!

Throughout the book, Tanner and those around him suffer from infections and fevers.  He lived in an era where diseases were common and largely incurable, for both wild folks and the civilized.  Howard Simpson described the situation after 1812, as settlement of the Midwest began:  “The most lethal dangers the pioneers had to face were neither savages nor wild animals.  They were typhoid, malaria, dysentery, malignant scarlet fever, pneumonia, erysipelas in epidemic form, spotted fever, or what would now be called meningococcal meningitis, and diphtheria.”

Homo sapiens is a bipedal species — we move on two legs, not four.  This evolutionary trait enabled long distance running, chasing game until they collapsed from exhaustion, a practice often mentioned in discussions of the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert.  Tanner also mentioned this.  “There are among the Indians some, but not many, men who can run down an elk on the smooth prairie, when there is neither snow nor ice.  The moose and the buffalo surpass the elk in fleetness, and can rarely be taken by fair running by a man on foot.”

Tanner, armed with a low tech, single shot musket, killed lots of animals.  One winter, he was hired by a fur company to provide meat for Scottish settlers.  In four months, he killed about 100 buffalo.  Another winter, he hunted with a buddy.  “O-ke-mah-we-ninne, as he was called, killed nineteen moose, one beaver, and one bear.  I killed seventeen moose, one hundred beavers, and seven bears, but he was considered the better hunter, moose being the most difficult of all animals to kill.”

Nomadic people found some trade goods useful: muskets, ammo, gunpowder, knives, axes, pots, blankets, corn, etc.  They gained no prestige by hoarding valuable trade goods, because it was dumb.  The stuff they owned had to be hauled along, every time they moved to a new camp.  So, one pot was enough.  Consequently, they trapped just enough to secure the necessities, and no more.  Traders learned a toxic secret — offering booze seriously motivated the trappers to produce far more pelts.

Oblivion drinking is a regular celebration in this saga.  After a long, harsh winter of trapping, pelts would be taken to the trading post.  Necessities would be acquired, and the leftover income would be invested in 10 gallon (38 l) kegs of booze.  Over the course of the book, at least 100 gallons of rum and whiskey were guzzled.  Multi-day drunks often resulted in impolite comments, bloody fights, and murders.  Their lives were harsh, and a lovely drunk provided a vacation from the daily routine, a spirit journey.  Booze destroyed many lives.

In Tanner’s day, in roadless woodlands, dogs were their beasts of burden.  On the wide-open prairie, there was a new beast of burden, the horse.  The Spanish had brought horses to America, and some escaped.  They rapidly grew in numbers.  By 1700 or 1750, plains Indians had horses — lots of horses.  Horses greatly increased their ability to hunt, feed more people, and zoom across the plains at superhuman velocity.

Each horse was the private property of an individual.  Only fools hoarded 100 iron pots, but owning 100 horses provided immense social status.  Horses fed themselves, moved themselves to new camps, and hauled people and stuff.  Stealing them from neighbors was an exciting way to demonstrate your bravery and get rich quick, or die trying.  Raiding was a popular pastime.  Naturally, it was a good way to make enemies, and ignite long-term feuds.  In the horse age, living in a remote location was no longer safe and secure.

Tanner described the bloody side of raiding:  “I had four horses, one of which was a very fleet and beautiful one, being considered the best out of one hundred and eighty which a war-party of Crees, Assinneboins, and Ojibbeways, had recently brought from the Fall Indians.  In this excursion they had been absent seven months.  They had fallen upon and destroyed one village, and taken one hundred and fifty scalps, besides prisoners.”

Tanner spent most of his life in the Great White North, a region known for long and extremely harsh winters.  On chilly nights, they huddled around fires inside drafty lodges.  Tanner mentioned several close calls with death.  Once, after breaking through the ice, “we were no sooner out of the water than our moccasins and clothes were frozen so stiff that we could not travel.  I began also to think that we must die.  But I was not like my Indian brother, willing to sit down and wait patiently for death to come.”

Homo sapiens evolved on the warm tropical savannahs of Africa, where a year round supply of organic food was generally available.  They didn’t need clothing or shelter.  Hypothermia was never a risk.  Life was so much easier in an ecosystem for which evolution had fine-tuned our bodies.  Remember that.  The status quo is zooming toward sharp limits, and our soft lifestyles are a temporary high-impact luxury.

Tanner, John, The Falcon, Penguin Books, New York, 1994.  Free PDF download.

Culpepper, Mike, John Tanner Between Two Worlds.  This 10-page essay fills in many helpful details missing in Tanner’s words, and better describes the big picture dramas that affected his life.  It discusses his controversial end.

Fierst, John T., Return to Civilization, Minnesota History, Minnesota Historical Society, 1986.  This 15-page essay describes Tanner’s troubled life in Sault Ste. Marie, in the years after his story had been published.

Dr. Edwin James transcribed Tanner’s story, in 1828, at Sault Ste. Marie.  He edited out lots of excessive details, to make the story more readable.  The 1830 edition, published by Baldwin & Craddock in London, includes an 18-page introduction by James (HERE).

Muir, Diana, Reflections in Bullough’s Pond — Economy and Ecosystem in New England, University Press of New England, Hanover, New Hampshire, 2000.  Chapter one describes the ecological and social turbulence generated by the adaptation of agriculture by the Native Americans.

Simpson, Howard N., “The Impact of Disease on American History,” The New England Journal of Medicine CCL (1954):680.

The Old North Trail



In 1891, Walter McClintock graduated from Yale, with plans to join his father’s prosperous carpet making business in smog-choked Pittsburgh.  Luckily, he was spared from a dull job by getting very sick with typhoid fever.  To recover, he took a trip to North Dakota, where he fell deeply in love with the west.  He worked as a photographer for a forest survey project, and became friends with the team’s Blackfoot scout, Siksikakoan.  Later, Siksikakoan introduced him to the elderly chief Mad Wolf.

Once Mad Wolf came to trust McClintock, he adopted the young lad as his son.  Mad Wolf hoped that if his people had a white leader, they would receive better treatment from the incoming settlers, many of whom were not skilled at behaving with common decency.  McClintock spent lots of time with a number of elders, listened to many stories, and several years later wrote The Old North Trail.  He also took more than a thousand photographs, many of which illustrate the book.  Today, a century later, Amazon lists his book as a best seller.  It’s fascinating and easy to read.

The Blackfeet lived on the plains east of the Rocky Mountains, from Montana up into Alberta.  When the painter George Catlin met them in 1832, he said they were the happiest Indians or all.  The Old North Trail was an ancient footpath that passed through their territory.  In places, old ruts are still visible.  Today, some suspect that it may have been 2,000 to 3,000 miles long, linking Canada and Mexico.  Because many tribes used the trail, travel was dangerous.  It was a common place for ambushes and tribal wars.

In the old days, the Blackfeet used dogs as beasts of burden.  Sometime before 1750, they acquired horses, triggering radical change.  Horses greatly increased their ability to hunt, feed more people, wage war, haul trade goods, and zoom across the plains at superhuman velocity.  Corn farmers became highly vulnerable to horse-mounted raids by neighboring tribes, forcing many to abandon their fields and become nomadic.  After 1780, the Blackfeet were hammered by wave after wave of deadly diseases.  Their population dropped by maybe 90 percent.

By 1883, white folks had succeeded in nearly exterminating the buffalo, and this made the traditional Blackfoot life impossible.  The tribe was forced onto reservations, given ration tickets, treated like dogs, and were not allowed freedom of travel.  Missionaries introduced them to sin, hell, damnation, guilt, and submission.  Teachers taught youths the ABC’s of civilization, using the English language.

By the time McClintock arrived, many young Blackfeet were disoriented victims of cultural genocide, largely indifferent to their tribe’s customs, traditions, and religion.  During important ceremonies, many would be drinking, gambling, or horseracing.  Only the elders still remembered the traditional ways, and their days were numbered.  McClintock wanted to record the story of these people, before their culture ceased to exist.  The Blackfeet people fascinated McClintock, and he described them in a respectful manner.

His book is a magical 500-page voyage into another time and place.  Readers can soar away from the spooky nightmare world of automobiles and cell phone zombies, and imagine living in wildness and freedom.  The Blackfeet elders shared fond memories of a way of life that was far more in balance with the circle of life.  In the good old days, “the mountain slopes abounded in beaver, wapiti, moose, mountain sheep, and grizzly bears, while immense herds of antelope and buffalo roamed over the plains.”

One night, McClintock awoke to discover a huge grizzly bear stepping over him to finish off his dinner leftovers.  Grizzlies were still common.  Wolves and coyotes often howled passionate serenades under the stars.  Humans were not the dominant species; they were delicious two-legged meatballs.  Modern folks, obsessed with glowing screens, would not have lasted long in a reality where man-eating carnivores were never far away.  To survive, folks actually had to pay careful attention to reality, and behave in an intelligent manner.  Imagine that!

The people wore clothing of animal hides, and lived in tipis, in an ecosystem of scorching summers and long blast-freezer winters.  Powerful storms could race across the plains at astonishing speed.  On a pleasantly warm November day, McClintock noticed distant turbulent clouds that were rushing across the plains in his direction.  Danger!  The temperature sharply dropped, howling winds pounded him, and a whiteout blizzard commenced.  He lost all sense of direction, and freezing to death was a strong possibility.  He managed to return to camp.  The storm lasted ten days.

McClintock wrote, “The Blackfeet subsisted mainly upon buffalo meat, when it could be secured.  They also used sarvis berries, wild cherries, buffalo berries and vegetables such as camas, wild turnips, wild onions, wild potatoes, bitter root, and wild rhubarb.  They secured wild ducks and geese by striking them over the head with long sticks.  Beaver tails were considered a great delicacy.”

A vegetarian would soon starve on the plains.  The Blackfeet survived by killing and eating their animal relatives.  When natives died, their corpses were returned to the circle of life.  The dead were placed upon scaffolds built in trees, called death lodges (like THIS or THIS).  The Blackfeet did not arrogantly interrupt the circle dance of life with buried caskets or cremation.

McClintock was amazed by how well the Blackfeet lived without thrashing their ecosystem.  Whites did amazing things with science and industry, but the Blackfeet were superior in terms of their personal integrity.  In no Blackfoot community could you find the “depravity, misery, and consuming vice, which involve multitudes in the industrial centers of all the large cities of Christendom.”  By thriving in a lifestyle with few wants, they did not deteriorate into infantile consumers.

The last chapter in the book has pissed off many reviewers.  The preceding thirty-eight chapters did not provide, in any way, a flattering impression of settler society.  In 1910, respect for savages was politically incorrect, and publishers were not fond of risky projects.  The Blackfeet were hopelessly screwed.  Whites were here to stay.  Happy endings sold more books.

So, the story concludes with a jarring shift.  McClintock praised the integrity of the Blackfoot people, and was proud of their heroic advance toward Christian civilization.  “The industrious are rapidly becoming self-supporting.  Some of them live in well-made and comfortable houses, and own ranches, with large herds of cattle and horses.  They wear white men’s clothes, purchased from the trading stores, own high priced wagons and buggies and make use of modern farming implements.”  Hooray!

Anyway, the book provides readers with a wonderful peephole into a way of life that was not insane.  Children were raised in a land that was wild, free, and thriving — grizzly bears, not teddy bears.  The good power (Great Spirit) was everywhere, in everything — mountains, plains, winds, waters, trees, birds, and animals.  Everyone was on the same cultural channel, free from the friction of diversity and wealth inequality.  They grew up in coherent communities where it was rare to see a stranger.  [Cool excerpt]

McClintock’s book described how a healthy culture disintegrated into incoherence over the course of just one generation.  Beliefs got us into this mess, not genes.  I’m very optimistic that the coming decades of resource depletion, climate change, and the collapse of our economic system will provide a miraculous cure for consumer fever.  Survival will require paying careful attention to reality, and behaving in an intelligent manner.  Radical change in one generation is not totally impossible when the time is ripe.  Think positive!

McClintock, Walter, The Old North Trail, MacMillan and Co., London, 1910.

A free download of the book is HERE.  Over 1,400 of McClintock’s photos are HERE (click “View all images”).

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

The Heart of the Hunter

Laurens van der Post (1906-1996) was born in South Africa and grew up to be a reporter, dairy farmer, soldier, writer, and television personality.  He was the godfather of Prince William, and was sometimes referred to as “Prince Charles’ guru,” because he was a mystical visionary with a wise old soul, quite skilled at thinking outside the box. 

He took great pleasure in creating fascinating stories intended to wake up people whose thinkers had fallen asleep.  The transformative power of his stories was far more important to him than 100% factual accuracy, and he sometimes “embellished” them to make them more forceful.  This was the storyteller’s job: creating amazing stories — not rigidly accurate scientific discourses.

Laurens was not universally loved by white South Africans, because he had an annoying habit of criticizing segregation, racism, and oppression.  He had special fondness for the Bushmen, who were sharply mistreated by everyone, both black and white.  Bushmen once inhabited all of southern Africa, but black and white newcomers drove them off their best lands, forcing them into the Kalahari Desert, an extremely harsh place. 

In 1955, Laurens did a documentary on the Bushmen for the BBC, and it was the second most popular program ever, only the queen’s coronation had a bigger audience.  He went on to write several books on Bushmen themes, including The Heart of the Hunter.  Passages from this book are often quoted by writers of the counterculture, because Laurens had profound respect for the ability of simpler societies to live lightly on the Earth, with great reverence.  He also had a robust contempt for modern industrial society, and he did not hesitate to express this.  He had a front row seat for World War II, and this adventure in industrial warfare took much of the shine off of civilization’s reputation.

Laurens introduced us to his beloved wild Bushmen, people of “irrepressible gaiety.”  One elder was “utterly at one with all the life that was and could ever be.”  Bushmen were incredibly in tune with nature, and could feel the presence of unseen animals.  They could sense danger from far away.  They could communicate telepathically.  They didn’t work hard, they didn’t have jobs, they didn’t have leaders, and they were free.  Free!  They had a culture that worked.  John Reader once wrote that the Bushmen were able to live in their ordinary manner during the third year of extreme drought that killed 180,000 people and 250,000 cattle. 

Unfortunately, the Bantu and European newcomers were farmers, herders, and assorted moneymakers — property freaks — and the way they treated Bushmen was similar to the relationship between Montana ranchers and prairie dogs.  Consequently, the Bushmen avoided all contact with the outside world, because the dominant culture treated them like sub-human vermin, or no-cost slaves, or future tax-paying peasants or diamond miners.

Laurens lamented modern society, with its vast hordes of property freaks, the tragic innocent victims of arrested development.  Because of our estrangement from nature, our minds had lost contact with core human instincts, we had lost our souls, we were starved for meaning, and we were mindlessly destroying system after system.  He decreed: “One look at the identical towns we are building all over the world ought to be enough to show us that this kind of progress is like the proliferation of a single cell at the expense of the rest, which produces the cancer that kills the whole body.” 

In 1961, Laurens did not think like the herd.  He celebrated wild freedom, and denounced the destructive insanity of industrial civilization.  Yet he was a popular and respected celebrity in Britain, and he sipped champagne with the richest and most powerful.  He was knighted in 1981, becoming Sir Laurens van der Post, an extraordinary achievement for someone who was so at odds with mainstream thinking.

The power of this book lies in its rebellious and unconventional attitude.  It’s OK to think.  It’s OK to question.  It’s OK to shout “Wolf!” when there are wolves as far as the eye can see.  It’s OK to be different, to prefer integrity over trendiness, to seek truth instead of mindless conformity.  If your heart is screaming about the senseless destruction of life on Earth, you aren’t crazy, you’re awake.  What’s crazy is our way of life, our culture.  This is an important concept to understand.

Creative people have a primary role to play in influencing the path of our society, because society permits them to think outside the box.  Popes, politicians, tycoons, and educators aren’t allowed to do this, because they have an obligation to protect and preserve the pathological belief system that is laying waste to the world.  Everything we need for healing can only be found outside the box, and creative people can help us find them, with luck.

The weakness of the book is that it doesn’t teach us a great deal about the Bushmen way of life.  Laurens knew few Bushmen, spent little time with them, and didn’t know their language.  The BBC documentary was almost aborted because Laurens and his team had a very hard time finding any Bushmen to film.  Finally they found one band, who allowed themselves to be seen, because they were close to dying from dehydration.  You could learn much more about the Bushmen by reading Elizabeth Marshall Thomas.

The Bushmen finally got their own official home when the Central Kalahari Game Reserve was created in 1961.  This Denmark-sized park was located in the middle of what is now Botswana.  But diamonds were discovered on the reserve in the early ‘80s, and this inspired the government to remove the Bushmen from their land.  In 2006, they won the right to return, but were forbidden to hunt or drink water.  In 2011, they won the right to drink water. 

Botswana promotes safari tours at the reserve, and this generates a lot of income for an extremely poor country.  Rich tourists want to enjoy a pure wilderness experience, gazing at giraffes from their hot tubs, and wild, naked, blood-spattered savages would simply spoil this demented fantasy.  Laurens would have a different opinion, of course.

van der Post, Laurens, The Heart of the Hunter, Harcourt Brace & Company, New York, 1961.