Excerpts

(Introduction and Sample Chapter)

ANTHROPOLOGY

            The Hunkpapa Lakota leader Tatanka Yotanka, known in English as Sitting Bull, is famous for leading a coalition force of Lakota, Dakota and Cheyenne warriors to victory over a US cavalry regiment in the 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn, or Custer's Last Stand.  If your high school history book contained one picture of a Native American, it was probably him.  But books that show his looks seldom make room for Sitting Bull's personality, and we can forget that the reason people followed him into battle is that he was a respected holy man and great speaker.  An example from 1875:

“Hear me, friends!  We have now to deal with another people, small and feeble when our forefathers first met with them, but now great and overbearing.  Strangely enough, they have a mind to till the soil, and the love of possessions is a disease in them.  These people have made many rules that the rich may break, but the poor may not!  They have a religion in which the poor worship, but the rich will not!  They even take tithes of the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule.  They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her, and deface her with their buildings and their refuse.  They compel her to produce out of season, and when sterile she is made to take medicine in order to produce again.  All this is sacrilege.  This nation is like a spring freshet; it overruns its banks and destroys all who are in its path.”[1] 

            What sort of people would do this?  Double standards in law enforcement?  Taxing the poor to feed the rich?  Trashing the earth, then pumping it full of chemicals to produce more food?  Sitting Bull was describing the European-American almost a hundred and fifty years ago, and yet his assessment is no less valid today – the flooding creek he referred to is becoming an apocalyptic tidal wave. 

            The study of human cultures is called Anthropology.  And while that word might conjure an image of some well-meaning professor taking notes in a village of shirtless natives, cultural observation works both ways.  For this last five hundred years, Indigenous Americans have been carefully studying white people – not just as an academic curiosity, but as a matter of life and death. 

“Who can understand the whiteman? 

What makes him tick? 

How does he think and why does he think the way he does? 

Why does he talk so much? 

Why does he say one thing and do the opposite? 

Most important of all, how do you deal with him? 

Obviously, he is here to stay. 

Sometimes it seems like a hopeless task.”[2]

            Being “white” and a man myself, I agree about the hopelessness of this task – having observed “white” culture all my life I'm still mystified by it.  “White” culture is massively destructive, clearly in the pursuit of some sort of comfort, and yet most “white” people don't seem very comfortable.  I can't figure it out.  But I believe that this question of “what makes the whiteman tick?” (what motivates him?) is vitally important: if we can figure out why he's on this destructive path, what he hopes to find, maybe it can enable us to look at other, less destructive paths to those goals.  And one way to examine the question is to get a second opinion, an outsider perspective, preferably from outsiders who've had a long time to observe “white” culture. 

            So I've been studying Native American texts from this last five centuries, collecting various observations about the “white man.”  Obviously there is no single “Native American” opinion on this or any topic.  There is a great diversity of Native American cultures, and within each tribe there has been a diversity of personal perspectives over the course of several centuries.  It's not my intention to say “Here's what Native Americans think,” but rather to present a collage of individual quotes that strike me as thought-provoking and instructive.

            The expression “White Man” can refer to historical individual human beings, and can also refer to a swarm.  In this collective sense, the “White Man” becomes something of a mythical composite figure, either superhuman or subhuman.

            Many Native Americans who grew up in the 1800s remember hearing about the “White Man” in childhood as a kind of demonic zombie.  Piute author Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins remembers “There was a fearful story they told us children. Our mothers told us that the whites were killing everybody and eating them. So we were all afraid of them. Every dust that we could see blowing in the valleys we would say it was the white people.”[3]  Twentieth century songwriter Buffy Sainte Marie wrote that even in adulthood “I sleep in fear of the blue-eyed Nazi wrapped in red-white-and-blue.”[4] 

            In 1781, the Delaware chief Pachgantsilias gave a speech saying “I admit that there are good white men, but they bear no proportion to the bad; the bad must be the strongest, for they rule. They do what they please. They enslave those of us who are not of their color, although created by the same Great Spirit who created us. They would make slaves of us if they could, but as they cannot do it, they kill us!”[5]  Within a year of his speech, white marauders slaughtered his entire community. 

            The collective “White Man” has been responsible for two kinds of harm: intentional massacres like the one at Wounded Knee, and also crimes of neglect and apathy, like buying petroleum that has been hazardously pipelined through Native lands.  Sioux activist John Trudell wrote:

“Our enemy is not the individual white man.  Our enemy is the collective white man.  Our enemy is the American state.  The American state is the corporations and the corrupt politicians that are selling us out.  These are the enemies.  The collective white man sits back and allows this to happen...  If there is ever going to be peace, love and understanding between the races, he's got to understand that he is in the wrong.”[6]

            The “White Man” can never be at peace with others until he comes to understand himself.  I hope that the observations in this book will contribute to that self-understanding.

HOUSES AND CITIES

“White man’s symbol is the square.  Square is his house, his office buildings with walls that separate people from one another.  Square is the door which keeps strangers out, the dollar bill, the jail.  Square are white man’s gadgets - boxes, boxes, and more boxes - TV sets, radios, washing machines, computers, cars...  You become a prisoner inside all these boxes.” John Fire Lame Deer, 1972[7] 

            In 1676, as French traders urged the Micmacs to adopt European customs, a chief responded:

“I am truly astonished that the French have so little cleverness. They try to persuade us to convert our poles, our barks, and our wigwams into their houses of stone and of wood that are as tall and lofty as these trees. Very well! But why do men of five to six feet in height need houses that are sixty to eighty?  Do we not have all the advantages in our houses that you have in yours, such as reposing, drinking, sleeping, eating, and amusing ourselves with friends when we wish?  Have you as much ingenuity as the Indians, who carry their houses and their wigwams with them so that they may lodge wherever they please? We can say that we are at home everywhere, because we set up our wigwams with ease wherever we go, without asking permission from anyone.”[8] 

            For Europeans, housing was more than just a roof over their heads for the night – a large house was also a sign of status, and a multi-story building was a means of concentrating population in urban areas: stacking homes on top of each other so that city employers could have a greater range of interchangeable employees to choose from (and being easily replaceable would make laborers more vulnerable to exploitation).  But these advantages did not matter to the Micmac tribe, who valued freedom over competition.

            As a member of the nomadic Oglala Sioux tribe, Black Elk lived his early life in a teepee, a portable, conical tent made of buffalo-leather, in a circular village.  But after resettlement, his people were forced to make “these little gray houses of logs that you see, and they are square. It is a bad way to live, for there can be no power in a square.  You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round...  Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours...  Our tepees were round like the nests of birds, and these were always set in a circle, the nation's hoop, a nest of many nests, where the Great Spirit meant for us to hatch our children.  But the Wasichus have put us in these square boxes.”[9] 

            Most modern Americans would see nothing odd about square or rectangular houses on streets laid out in grids.  The benefit of living in a grid is that it makes it easier to find the person or place you're looking for in a large city full of strangers.  The benefit of a small circular village is that there are no strangers: it connects each household with the community - both inwardly toward the human village community, and outwardly toward the rest of the community of life.

            Early European-Americans are often referred to as “Settlers,” which gives the idea of the Natives as wanderers, nomads (in fact the majority of American Natives lived in settled farming villages before the Europeans chased them off their lands, forcing some to become nomads).  Our modern cities are certainly settled – they're not movable villages.  And yet Vine Deloria wrote that, although American cities may be built and established, the urban lifestyle requires a new sort of nomadism: “Today the land is dotted with towns, cities, suburbs, and the like.  Yet very few of these political subdivisions are in fact communities.  They are rather transitory locations for the temporary existence of wage earners.  People come and go as the economics of the situation demand.”[10] 

            Many modern Americans, particularly in the educated classes, will spend their working lives foraging career opportunities from city to city, essentially as interchangeable migrant workers.  And because of this constant population flux, American cities themselves are becoming increasingly interchangeable – a doctor relocating from Philadelphia to Austin will find essentially the same Episcopal Church, McDonald's and K-Mart.

            It is from the Latin word civitas, “city,” that we get the word “Civilization,” and city-building is generally considered a pivotal cultural advancement.  The first cities (in the Middle East and China, as well as in North and South America) arose with the advent of full-time farming, as tools for locking up food from the surrounding farm-lands, storing and protecting it, and forcing non-farmers to work for it.  It always surprises my college students to hear that a city is a tool, but if we look at any modern city on Earth, from Buffalo to Tokyo to Lagos, we see that they still fulfill this same function: locking up what is most valuable (food) and forcing people to work for it. 

            Before the Europeans arrived, there had already been massive experiments with full-time farming and complex cities here in North America, but these had been long abandoned.  We might automatically see leaving “Civilization” in favor of a simpler woodsy tribal life as a cultural devolution.  But abandoning a complex system of taxation and coercion in favor of an egalitarian communalism could also be considered a cultural advancement.  Many of us in modern America (and, I assume, most people who are reading this book) would happily leave our jobs and apartments and taxes behind and live a more natural, community-centered life, if the food wasn’t locked up and the forests weren’t gated off.  A city certainly is good for packing people together, but it does not necessarily unify us the way a village would.

            In 1970, a group of Hopi traditional leaders issued a statement about advancing technology: “Great roads like rivers pass across the landscape; man talks to man through cobwebs of telephone lines; man travels along the roads in the sky in his airplanes [and] is tampering with the Moon and stars.”[11]  But these Hopi leaders were concerned that the technologies developed to move and connect human beings would also separate and alienate people from each other, and further diminish the human sense of connection with the land. 

            Our civilization takes great pride in its ability to send a man to the moon, but down here on Earth we cannot find solutions to problems of injustice and pollution.  Travel and communication technologies have advanced at an incredible rate since 1970, and yet we deal with a growing cultural epidemic of isolation and alienation: “Technology has brought us a lot of commodities, more securities, more scientific knowledge, but life appears to have less and less meaning for humanity.  Never before has humanity been so empty and bored, or made so many efforts to desperately acquire more.”[12] 

            John Fire Lame Deer wrote about this human alienation, and his words from 1972 are even truer today, as Americans explore digital frontiers:

“I think white people are so afraid of the world they created that they don’t want to see, feel, smell, or hear it....  Living in boxes which shut out the heat of summer and chill of winter, living inside a body that no longer has a scent, hearing a noise from the hi-fi instead of listening to the sounds of nature, watching some actor on TV having a make believe experience when you no longer experience anything for yourself, eating food without taste - that’s your way.  It’s no good.”[13]

[1]     Sitting Bull / Tatanka Yotanka (Hunkpapa Sioux, 1875) in Blaisdell (2000) p. 166.  A “tithe” is a religious tax.

[2]     Harold Cardinal (Cree, 1969) in Basso (1979) p. 3.  The expression “what makes someone tick” comes from the age of clockwork.

[3]     Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins (Piute, 1883)

[4]     Buffy Sainte-Marie (Canadian Cree) in Katz (1977) p. 169

[5]     Pachgantsilias (Delaware, 1781) in Rosenstiel (1983) p. 97

[6]     Trudell, John (Sioux, 1974) in Cobb (2015) p. 164

[7]     John Fire Lame Deer (Miniconjou Sioux, 1972)

[8]     Anonymous (Micmac, 1676) in Rosenstiel (1983) p. 55

[9]     Black Elk (Oglala Sioux, 1932) in Neihardt (1988) p. 194-195

[10]    Deloria (1994) p. 214

[11]    Hopi Traditional Village Leaders (Hopi, 1970) in Rosenstiel (1983) p. 176

[12]    Okhi Simine Forest (Mohawk, 2005) in Nelson (2008) p. 237

[13]    John Fire Lame Deer (Miniconjou Sioux, 1972)