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.
