The “We All Come From Tribes” event began with a memorial to the three slain indigenous rights activists whose murders, apparently at the hands of “Columbian Revolutionaries,” shocked the native and environmentalist communities. One of the activists, Ingrid Washinawatok (Menominee) was a close friend of many in the audience, including John Trudell. Thier murders had been announced the day prior to this event.
ROSEMARY CAMBRA: I’d like to introduce John Trudell.
JOHN TRUDELL: I’ll be as coherent as I can. I don’t know exactly where we are going. I want to say a few words about Ingrid and the things that happened in Columbia. I don’t think I am really going too far into it tonight, but it was a bad thing. And it makes me wonder. See, I think insanity just prevails. There are no good guys, there are only victims and murderers. They have all gone nuts, the revolutionaries and all that, you know. They become the terrorists. They become what they hate. You take the neutral and the unarmed, and you murder them. There is no justification, no matter what anybody says. They are all insane. The same madness eats all of them. The same madness.
So, somewhere there has to be another way of thinking. Personally, I think all this madness and insanity is because, they got the weapons of war and all the stuff, but they need all that because they are disconnected from of the reality of power. So violence becomes a substitute and revolutionary love has no meaning, it is the same as the hater’s love, because if they’ve got to kill the innocent then they are all full of bullshit, that is all it is. No killing the innocent. The unarmed, the people that don’t want to be in it— no killing them! All right, I want to talk about who we are because this insanity prevails. Sometimes I feel like I am in a reality, it all drove me a little mad and crazy a long time ago. But I am not mad (laughs), I just don’t understand why you aren’t (laughs.) But, about who we are, I feel [we are] in a reality, in a society, where we don’t know who we are. No matter what our good intentions. You know Crazy Horse said “there is the real world and the shadow of the real world.” We come from the real world but we are in the shadow, and because the shadow is the shape that the shadow is, we don’t really know who we are. We can’t see ourselves anymore. So no matter what our intentions are as we go through our lives and whatever it is we are into— no matter what we are about, if we don’t know who we are, then none of it gets really synchronized. We are Human Beings. Human. Beings. More than a word, more than a phrase, more than a biological term. We are Human Beings. Human: the visible. Being: the invisible [made] visible. Human Being. Human: the bone, flesh and blood, our DNA. Our bone, flesh and blood is literally made up of the metals, minerals and liquids of the Earth. We are shapes of the Earth. That is exactly who we are. We are made of the Earth. We come out of the Earth. This is our shape, our form, just as all things of the Earth are made of the Earth. This is who we are. And we have Being, essence, spirit. All things of the Earth are made of the same DNA, only the form is different. So therefore, all things of the Earth have Being also, because we have Being, all things have Being, essence, spirit. Any relationship that we are ever going to have in the real world, in reality, to what is truly power is in that relationship to Being. We have been programmed to be confused between authority and power. They are two different things, two different realities. In the real world power is power. In the shadow of the real world authority becomes power. It is the new memory that is being brought to this hemisphere, just as it was brought to Europe at the millennium. We are Human Beings. Our relationship to power is understanding that the Being part is our essence, our spirit. That is us. That is our relationship to the spirit world. We are half spirit. So any relationships that we are truly going to have to reality is based upon that relationship. The other thing about who we are: we all come from tribes. Every person in this room comes from a tribe or is a descendant of a tribe. Every person in this room is the descendant of a tribe. Every person in this room— because we are descendants of tribes and we are Human Beings; because of our lineage and our DNA; and because of our physical reality and our spiritual reality— has a genetic memory. This memory carries the experience of our evolution. It is our access to power into the reality of where we come from and who we are. It is like our access to power. See, we are in civilized techno logic shadow reality that is not about reality. It is about Heaven and Hell and not about reality. We have a genetic memory. In our genetic memory, we all come from tribes. That information is there. In our genetic memory, there was a time, a time in our lineage, when we understood the Earth, and called earth “Mother Earth.” We all said, “Mother Earth” because we knew we came from the Earth. We knew it because that was part of our evolution. We knew it. And Spirit and Sky was Father and Son. The planetary system was Father, spirit. And because we all had that reality, we literally had a spiritual perception of reality. We understood that all things have spirit. The past has spirit. The future has spirit. Now has spirit. The past and the future, their spirit is effected by what happens with ours now. And because we had this spiritual perception of reality we understood that life was about responsibility. We were responsible for the now and the past and the future. We were responsible to the descendants and the ancestors. Therefore, we had to be responsible to ourselves. Our spiritual perception of reality taught us that life was about responsibility. All of our access to power was around that reality, that spiritual reality. We had power, we knew who we were, we knew what our purpose in life was, we understood all the knowledge of the community. We understood we had power because we were surrounded by it…. As long as we understood that reality our ways of life remained intact. It is almost like a disease came like you got this energy, this spirit that is the Earth, and it is almost like the disease came and got into the system and somehow bred into man…. ….What happened with Columbus, and what is called the history? What happened to the Indians on this hemisphere? This history is exactly the same history that happened to the descendants of the tribes of Europe, same thing. It is the same history. We all come from tribes…. Somewhere, not on this hemisphere, a new idea appeared. This idea appeared somewhere else first, this new idea was that there was a God that had a male form. Originally there were Gods and Goddesses, there was this whole thing going on here, right. At some point in evolution, spirits started to take human identity. In some areas it was the female, so the Goddess became the supreme deity. There were also Gods and there were hundreds of them. Eventually the Gods slugged it out, through the machinations of man, until there was one universally recognized, though maybe recognized differently, God. The deal is that there was one God. This God had a male form. This God was removed away from the Earth. This whole concept was removed, separated, from the Earth. It was separated from the Earth. And this concept said that the Earth was no longer Mother, the Earth was now property because this divine male entity had created it. It was now … property. We were no longer children of Earth. We were now property of Earth. Because somebody else owned it, somebody else owned [us]. The Earth became property under this new concept. We are talking about dimensional leaps. This was the new concept. The new concept said “Oh, incidentally, you committed a moral crime by being born, and because of that you have got to answer, through the male line, to the authority— God.” Basically that means there is something wrong with you for being here. That is not recognizing who we are. [That is] the real identity crisis. Once we start to think there is something wrong with us for being, because that is what they said, then there is the beginning of an identity crisis because we can’t see ourselves clearly, no matter how much we huff and puff to the world. We can’t see ourselves clearly. In nowhere in collective ancestral lineage did any of our ancestors willingly embrace this concept. Nobody did. So it spread through force and violence; through human sacrifice, because war is human sacrifice; and the spilling of blood…. If all the things that were killed could bleed trees, plants, air the Earth would be a planet of blood. This whole techno logic perception of reality is extremely aggressive towards life in order to make the techno logic wheel continue to go. All things are related; all things have being. It is a very inappropriate use of our intelligence if we don’t understand, at least consider, that there is a mining process happening here. We are being put through a process. Our ancestors. It started way in the ancestral time that we started being put through a process. Where our Being, the being part of human, was being worked in such a way to be converted into a form of energy to help build these structures, the authoritarian systems and this shadow of the real world. Feel like something is missing out of your life? But I’m crazy (laughs.) So religion, the male concept of God, was one of the mining tools. Here is how this tool worked: The most effective thing that mining tool ever ever did was… When the Earth was still the Mother within the society, within each tribal society and reality, the men and the women had an equal balance because equality was needed for the overall continuation of life. The woman was manifested, she was the female form— the Earth was our Mother and she was the mother. So, in order to start plundering the Earth, sexism came from this. It didn’t come along later. “Well, let’s exploit women, because well, you know, they are good to exploit, or because we have the advantage and we can do it.” It was a necessary component to the wiping out of our memories, it was a necessary component. So in order to attack the Earth they had to attack the woman. Same thing with racism. In order to kill, remember we are all related, all things have being all are my relations, so it is in order to change that, first against the animals, right, and then it is easy to do it to the people. So this happened way back in our collective ancestry. Look at the tribes of Europe and the descendants of the tribes of the Europe. By the time, about a thousand years after the time of Christ, they [Europeans] no longer had a tribal memory, most of them, but they still had a relationship to a spiritual reality. They prayed and they celebrated old ways and they prayed in the old ways. The Church was growing its authority, and establishing its authority, and spreading. By then, pretty much, the descendants of the tribes of Europe were now property owned by landlords, royalty, and the Church. Remember that the Church has always been about the possessing of souls. That is what it is about. The whole trip was to possess the souls. People should think very seriously about what the hell they are talking about, “possess my soul.” What does this mean? This doesn’t make any sense. Nurture, all right, I will go for. Possess, no! I think that should go over there with that guilt stuff…. So the people were owned by these entities. And they were just like any part of the wildlife. [They were owned.] They couldn’t hunt. That is why later the Americans went nuts about hunting because for generations they weren’t allowed to hunt. They would be killed if they killed something that belonged to the landlord without the landlord’s permission. So, anyway about 1100 AD the descendants of the tribes of Europe no longer [had] the memory of the tribe but they still had some of the spiritual memory and it manifested in certain ways. Then the Church made the decision about 1100 or 1200 AD this was the Catholic Church at that time but then it all kind of grew out of there, from the Christian end they decided that [they] were the authority of God on Earth. They decided they were God’s government. So now, the descendants of the tribes of Europe who were still praying and following spirit ways and looking in this kind of direction they became the enemy now, because the Church created the Inquisition. The Inquisition was basically about thinking differently. If you thought differently than the Church wanted you to think, like if you thought spirits had some relation to reality but not God, then you were kind of like in deep shit because they were going to kill you. And then the “love of God” spread. I mean, it is sick, twisted, distorted crap. You think about it. It is insane. The descendants of the tribes of Europe now had to manifest their “love of God” through obedience to the Church. The Inquisition was going on right and left. Many, many, many women were killed then because, I will tell you, this was a clean up hitting time. So a great deal of it was against the women because some of these old ways still existed. By the time Columbus got here it had been going on for four hundred years. So, by the time Columbus got here an interesting thing love and fear were mixed together. For the descendants of the tribes of Europe, in order for them to survive, they had to love what they feared. They had to love what they feared. Love and fear became synonymous, love and fear. That is a web that kind of runs everywhere. But love and fear became connected then; they became one then. And, also, possession. Love, fear and possession became united then, because this was all about possession. It was always about possession. They said possessing the souls, but they were really talking [about] altering the perception of reality. So it was about possession. By the time Columbus got here Europe had been through four hundred years of this Inquisition. Four hundred years of being brutalized and terrorized. By the time Columbus got here, and Columbus saw the original people here and asked the original people, “Who are you?” And the original people said, “We are the original people.” Columbus didn’t get it. Nobody on the boat with him got it either, or any of those boats. Or any [of] them that ever came afterwards could get the concept of people. Human Beings. People. They didn’t get it. They literally did not get it because they had just been tortured for twenty generations. So they didn’t know what it was to be a Human Being; they were property. They had no relationship to life, all they had was terror. They did not know what it was to be a Human Being, they did not know. They were all pretending. They didn’t know anymore. So we were put through the experience that [Europeans]… had just come through because that was the only relationship and connection the [Europeans] had to reality. It was the only way they knew how to behave. It was almost like through…. the fear and terrorization they indoctrinated an entire society to be basically mindless, reactionary, fear driven and self destructive in a spiritual and, to a large degree, a physical way. And then the [Europeans] vented it out on everything they came in contact with, because their minds had been fucked with. They weren’t bad people, they just didn’t know any better. Their minds had been twisted by altering their perception of reality. It went to religion, state— landlord stuff— and the loyalties and obligations had to go… there. They couldn’t be to responsibility. They had to be to these … [authorities.] Someone has been mining us. I am telling you. I don’t know if it is Star Wars stuff or not but someone is mining. It is almost like a disease. It eats [us]. The spirit gets diseased and it effects the perception of reality of the human that carries the disease. The more diseased the spirit is then the further and further disconnected with reality the human becomes. It is like being eaten up, our lives being eaten up. The mining process [includes] guilt, sin and blame. That is part of the mining process… Words, we should understand about words. A word is a thought that has been externalized. It is a something that comes out of somewhere. You send it out into the vibratory world when you turn it into sound. It is like throwing a stone into a pond. There is a ripple. It is not just something that falls off your lips. Words have meanings. There has been a great deal of mining that has been done through of the meanings of words. The way we are programmed to use the words and understand the words, and to not understand the words. [Mining has gone on so that we are] not really knowing what the hell we are saying a great deal of the time. The words are familiar but we never really understand that these words have meanings, that there are things that go along with these words. An example: We have been programmed to think that the more money you get the more powerful you become. In reality, what money will do is get you access to authority. I have seen a lot of people with money and they have got no power, I guarantee it. They have authority. It is important not to mistake the difference between authority and power. Authority is that shadow world power system. That is all it is… So, Human Beings are being mined. Through this process the Being part of Human is being put through some of kind of civilizing techno logic perception of reality. Then the Being part of Human is turned into a form of energy to run an authority system, an economic system. It is all economic authority [used] to run these systems…. So, the words, we have been programmed to think that the more guns you have the more powerful you are. That is about access to authority, violent access to authority. It is not about power. If we believe that these things are power, if we believe that they are, if we believe it takes money to make power then we can talk about our personal power, and self empowerment, all we want until we drop dead but we will be so far disconnected from it… then we will never understand, and recognize ourselves, and our relationship to the reality of power. We were given protection as Human Beings. Our protection is our intelligence. We all have it, every one of us has it, we were all given it. Everything that ever happens to us in our daily life, in our life since we were born into this reality, everything that has ever happened to us, has influenced our perception of reality. It was done to us because it influenced our intelligence. It was done to our ancestors. Everything that happens influences our intelligence, everything. We have just been programmed and conditioned, and it just goes on through certain misconceptions here, to not understand who we are. If we understood who we are we would not put up with this stuff that goes on. I know we wouldn’t. If we were coherent, and if the society at large [were coherent] you [would] cut through [to] the reality. You look at the behavior pattern, not the rhetoric. If I lived in a society that felt it had any access to power— I know we would not be living in the reality that we are living in now. I just know it. We have got to start looking and asking “Well, what does that power really mean and how do I get [in touch with it?] What is this really about?” We need to think about things more. You know it is like “believe.” Words all have meaning. Believe is a dangerous word. This is maybe one of the more sacred words right? It is a careful [word] to use. It has a lie in the middle, b e lie v e. Part of the word is the lie, that is what balances the word. So we have to be very careful with that word. I think it is better [not to] have beliefs. This is a part of the mining process through definition because, you know, there are those in this reality, the predators that prey upon us, that want us to “believe,” they don’t want us to know. They don’t want us to think, they want us to believe. If we think then we might know. They would rather we don’t think. [They would rather] that we “believe”… This is a really curious word because it is not like active, it is a passive word. If I go about believing all the time then I am not participating. I am just believing. I am waiting for them to bring the dinner to my table. I am not using my intelligence. I am just waiting. If I am thinking then I am actively participating. If I am just locked into the dogma of my beliefs then I can’t really think, I can only pretend to be thinking. I can only think within the definition of what my beliefs are. We really need to think more and believe less. We need to think more. The protection we were given is our intelligence. We all have it. Our intelligence. This is our imagination, our thoughts, our creativity. Intelligence is how our spirit kind of speaks to us, through our feelings and senses. …Intelligence gets all of this: what we hear, what we feel in our spirit. Intelligence gets it all. We understand that [when] they mine the uranium, that there is a toxic waste. That they mine whatever they mine, and it leaves behind a poison. Well, we are being mined. All that fear and all that dark crap, all that stuff that gets in the way, that eats our intelligence rather than nurtures it, that is the pollution left from the mining of our being. Our intelligence is the built in remedy. When we make certain understandings then we can deal with all of it. We can clear everything up. That is the resilience. Our intelligence never stops functioning. It always goes. Just look in the dark side for just a moment. Inside of every individual head, how is the day spent? How much of the life is spent feeding and perpetuating certain fears and insecurities and paranoias? How much of that takes over anybody’s life? That is how we are using our intelligence. We have been programmed to use our intelligence that way. So that is how we are using our intelligence. It doesn’t mean that we don’t have intelligence. It just means that is how are using it. You think about it. You want to think about power? Every time these dark thoughts run through our mind, our head, how does it fuck up our reality? If it does, then we understand power. We have it. But it has been turned against us. The chaos they make in here almost sparks off some kind of energy thing that runs their thing…. We create our realities everyday. We have the ability, because we carry our genetic memory, to realize that life is still about responsibility. It still is. The first step back is to use our intelligence responsibly. The second step back is to always be real with ourselves. Never lie to ourselves. Shame or glory, don’t lie to ourselves. If we can’t be real with ourselves then anything we project into the world will be out of synchronization with the reality we want it to be in synchronization with. Because we are not being real to ourselves and we are the ones sending it out. We should never lie to ourselves. If in there we have stuff … that we can’t handle then don’t do it anymore. (laughs) …. If you got stuff in there that you can handle but don’t really like, but you can still handle it, then accept it. Just be real. Once we are real to ourselves, then will we start to clear up a little bit. Our intelligence. To use it as clearly and coherently as we can. We were given that gift. It is a gift. It is medicine. When we look at the conditions of the society and the world everything is environmental. Whether it is society or it is crime or it is the trees being murdered, everything is environmental. When we look around at all of this,.. we really need to think differently. We really need to re think this one out. We need to consider the trap. The trap of having reactionarism now, planted into the shadow reality we are in, and we are reacting so many times, so much. We think we are thinking, but we are not really thinking, because we are just putting it all into reacting, and we are missing the whole point of what the thinking is really about, because it is now trapped into reaction. We need to think some things through. I guarantee you that in this lifetime, in my lifetime anyway, I know there will be no political solution and no economic solution and no military solution and there is going to be no religious solution and I know it. This thing is only festering itself, out [of] control. There can be no solution until somebody starts to put some coherency into the energy system that is life. We need to think about DNA, Descendant, Now, Ancestor. Descendant, Now, Ancestor. Let us look at our descendants. Our descendants are anyone that is younger than us. There is no solution. No economic solution…. Maybe [all we have is] an understanding of what a gift our intelligence is. It is a gift. It is a weapon. It is protection. An understanding of what our intelligence is. This is what we were given. And with what is going on in the world? My understanding of reality is that the Earth lives. If this disease that is techno-logic industrialization, in all of its manifested madnesses, if it just continues to get out of control the Earth will change shape. Something will change. The Earth will change and that is the antibiotic that will take care of this disease because man and his sickness is not going to destroy Earth. Get over it. That is not going to happen. Man’s ability to live with the Earth can very well be tremendously altered. So whatever we have to do, politically or whatever, we have got to do, we need to use some intelligence and start to understand what power is. The more intelligence that the individuals manifest, the [more] coherence and clarity that the people will seek to put out from within their own intelligence. These are snowflakes that wait for the wind and then you have the blizzard. This is about power. They don’t want us to understand that about ourselves. I really am crazy and it is all right. I look at what the normal go through and accept, and… (laughs) They just stand around befuddled, and I think I don’t want that. I don’t want to be mad. But I know who I am and I have moments of coherency. I can be really coherent sometimes but I have equal moments of incoherency to match every moment of coherency. I understand this reality. There is nothing I climb to preach from. What you get is just the rant. One time I found out they had 17,000 pages, that the Feds had compiled, that the State had compiled on me, through the Freedom of Information Act. I know who I am (laughs.) I am none of the threats. I am not a military threat or an economic threat or any of that stuff. I figured it out. They spied on me. I know I didn’t do anything. I spoke my mind. That is when I got it. They don’t want us to think. That is when I understood that this is their vulnerability. They don’t want us to think. They don’t want us to discover that, and truly understand what [it] means. This way they eliminate the people that they think will make that happen. They eliminate them by physically killing them, imprisoning them, discrediting them. That way when people start really thinking about stuff, and people start to catch on, they find a way to eliminate or neutralize them. Then people see that they have created a paper hero and some bullshit that doesn’t even need to be. What makes sense, makes sense and it doesn’t matter who carries it. They find these ways to subvert stuff. That is when I understood, they don’t want us to think. I thank you for listening to me. My therapy group (laughs.) It is either this or go to work for the Post Office. Me and my gun go to work for the Post Office. That is a joke. I don’t have a gun. I thank you for your time. (applause) Thank you. ~