Very excited about what’s coming up, American Indian poet, musician and activist John Trudell visited the Bay area recently as an artist in residence at the Intersection of the arts in San Francisco, where he gave readings of his work and heart talks in small intimate settings. Here in a conversation with actor activist Peter Koyote, Trudell discusses his personal genius as a key player in the American Indian Movement, highlights defining moments of Native American struggles, and shows us how to recreate our language to reempower us all in the face of today’s monocultural monalith. We start out with Peter Coyote. Here it is. This was recorded, I should say one month ago at Intersection for the arts in San Francisco. Here’s Peter Coyote.
Peter Coyote: Wow, thanks a lot. It’s a full house. It’s a pleasure to be here. It’s a pleasure to be here with my pal John and I want to tell you a couple of working assumptions I’m going to make for the evening, and kind of give you a shape of it. The evening is designed really to introduce you to John, and kind of a lot of the tendrils of his life which are emblematic of larger issues. So at the risk of making false assumptions, I’m going to assume that this is largely an urban and white audience that may not be as conversant with some of the finer points of Indian history, Native struggle in the United States. Some I’m gonna take about the first half of the evening and address that to kind of give everybody a common background. And then the place where John and I really come most common is as artists. And so from that point I’m going to leave the conversation, or hopefully elicit responses that will talk about the relationship of culture to politics and the posture of the artist. So that’s going to be the kind of shape, and in the course of doing that, I’m going to refer to my notes. John just kick it off on a common–just tell us a little bit about where you were born, tribal affiliation, just a quick thumbnail sketch of your childhood and impressions of what politics and life was.
John Trudell: Well, I was born in 1946 in Omaha, Nebraska. And my tribe is Santee Dakota. Souix. And my reservation is Santee. It is up in northeastern Nebraska. And until maybe about the time I was around six I lived on the reservation and then my mother died when I was six, so maybe after about a year or some period of time we moved out, we moved Omaha. To the city. And then basically from that time until I was about seventeen I lived maybe half of my life in the city and half of my life on the reservation. So I was living two different realities. And I learned to adapt to both realities.
What was the reservation reality? Well, give us an emblem of the reservation reality.
Well, the reservation reality was really that we were, you know there was no class system. We were all poor. It’s that simple. And there weren’t a lot of people at that time, I mean, there weren’t very many people. Well, there just weren’t a lot of people on the reservation at that time. And so you know we didn’t have–I live with my grandparents a lot. And we didn’t have electricity or running water, indoor anything. And we had to cook and heat by wood, had to haul water, you know, do these kinds of things. And everybody was just really, really was poor. But there was a sense of community that existed there that did not exist off the reservation. See, off the reservation everybody had more. But the sense of community wasn’t there that was indigenous to my own reality I guess.
What about the sense of common culture on the reservation versus the city.
That’s what I mean by the sense of community. I thought, you know, our culture, this is who we are. I mean, I guess in one way you know everything was shared pretty much. I mean, in a sense of, you know, nobody had much, but if somebody came, they got fed.
Can you remember an incident or something that sparked a political understanding or opened the political lens, a way of looking at the world in your childhood?
When my mother died. But I mean, I’m looking back. But it raised a religious question, which I come to understand later is really a political question under the reality we’re in. But it made me, you know, cause I wasn’t brought up with religion, although my mother was a Catholic and I was baptized as a Catholic, but she died while I was young. After that I never had religion put to me, alright. But when she died I’d been told about God and I didn’t trust him. Just plain and simply put, I didn’t trust him. Because there was nothing I could understand or comprehend about God, so I didn’t trust him. And after that it made me start thinking, you know, when I looked back on it see is that I started to understand there’s a certain unfairness that existed in life. I got that from that sense of that happening. I never thought of anything in political terms until maybe I was a man or until I was much taller. Everything else was just what I saw, and it’s what it was, you know, at the time. But the thing I noticed about off of the reservation, right, is that number one, racism was a real deal. And class was a real deal. Although I didn’t relate to it in terms of class. It was some people got a lot and lots of people don’t have anything, or have, you know, hardly enough. See, but I became conscientious of these realities by the time I was a teenager. Life on the reservation was, the people I was running around with right, I mean, so we were drinking and just having a good time and doing things. But I was running, So when I’m a teenager, fifteen, sixteen, I’m running with people who are at my age and into their twenties and thirties see, and some were out of all that running. I realized these people are my partners because there’s nothing for them to do. And I understood that the reality was I needed to get out of where I was at because we were young and we were drinking, just partying and not doing anything bad, but just being young. But I knew that if the state got us we would go to prison for something.
So that was the option.
Yeah, That to me was the option. I was going to end up in prison, there was no doubt about it.
I think the first time that I heard of you or that we met was in some incident surrounding Alcatraz. How did you get from Omaha to Alcatraz, either physically or mentally?
I went around the world almost. So in order to get out of there I went into the military. And this was in 1963. And I went ino the military to get away from where I was. It really had nothing to do with patriotism or any kind of loyalties like that. It was, I needed to go somewhere because I wasn’t goin anywhere there, and I picked the Navy because, I look back on it, I made a conscious intelligent decision in my confusion because I picked the Navy because I thought you know. there’s no war going on now, but what if a war starts when I’m in there. If I’m in the Army or the Marines, I’m going to get a rifle in my hands and in the front lines. I didn’t want that. You know, and it turned out that there was a war that happened right and they didn’t have any Navy. It was a good decision on my part. [laughs] So anyway, but I didn’t adjust to the military. I didn’t like the military.
Really? [laughter]
No. It made no sense to me and I got into a lot of trouble and I had the court martials, and I had all this stuff right, and they were gonna kick me out. And then I said well that defeats my purpose, right. So I straightened up enough to make it through. And then I went from there to college. This was in ‘67. I got out of the military and I went to college for a little while. And I didn’t make it there either. Because in every given situation you know, whatever what I was learning is that whatever it took for me to make it in the outside world, I was going to have to give them something of me that I didn’t want to give them. See and that’s really what it was and that’s why I couldn’t fit into the system because I had an attitude about that. And so this is what led me to Alcatraz, because by the time Alcatraz came along, you know everything was happening and I had dropped out of school because I got pissed off at something that happened there you, know. I’m done with this, you know. And I was sitting, and I spent the summer and early part of the fall of ‘69, I was in school, but it was to get GI money. But it was to have some income. So I spent this the summer smokin pot, you know, and talking with this Armenian friend of mine and telling him, I don’t know where it is I’m going, but I just got to wait. I remember having these conversations.
So you’re 23 then?
Then I was twenty three. And then Alcatraz opened up and I went there and I knew this is where it’s at. See, because in a way, what Alcatraz was to me, I had spent basically by then, this was ‘69, so I had basically spent maybe six years away from the Native community into the outside world, you know, and whatever it was I was looking for, it wasn’t there. I tried what they had and it wasn’t there. None of it fit. And so when I went to Alcatraz, it was like walking back into my own community. The community was shaped different now, it was a different reservation, you know.
A lot of people in this audience are young, Why don’t you give them the thumb nailed sketch of the legitimacy behind the takeover, Alcatraz, and what it meant symbolically to the Native community.
Symbolically to the Native community it was like a rekindling of our spirit, you know. And it was like showing us that we are here and we all feel the same. It was a forum where we all got, and a way everybody got to see. We all were still here, you know, and we’re still reeling. And I think that was the symbolism, so to me it was like a rekindling of the spirit. That whole activist period, the thing that was accomplished by the activists period was to rekindle the spirit of the people because somebody was busy pouring water and sorrow on it.
Correct me if I’m a little wrong, but there’s some charter under the law that unused federal lands…
So we went to it under the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. And what we were saying at the time is we have a treaty right to reclaim this land because it’s written in this treaty about reclaiming unused federal land. And that was how we related to it at the time. And every issue that we ever got involved with politically after that was really around treaties. We may be talking about social issues, but basically it was always around the treaties. But when I looked back on it now what we were really talking about, but we couldn’t articulate it at the time, was we were talking about law. See because in reality, America claims to be a nation of laws. I personally think that that’s a lie. I personally know it’s a lie. Becuase to be a nation of law then all law must be equal. That’s just the way that it is now when we look at Americas laws there’s, common law, criminal law, constitutional law, statute law and treaty law. But of those laws any time they say it, see they’ll say constitutional law, they don’t drop the word law. They don’t drop it after statute law or common law or criminal law, but when it comes to treaties, they drop the word law. So in reality what we were saying to America, is you have a legal responsibility, this isn’t about your mortality, you have no morality. It’s about your legal responsibility. Alright, if you’re to be a nation of law, then you have a legal responsibility to fulfill these national and international legal agreements that were made between us as people and you as people. And that’s really what it was about between sovereign nations. So it’s about law. So I come out of Alcatraz understanding America isn’t about law. So law’s a perfect hook. So in 1972 there were a series of caravans that were going to go to Washington, and they were going to educate native people along the way. And during that time Richard Oakes got killed, and a number of groups decided to go and demand that the FBI investigate his murder. That they didn’t want the red-necks where he was killed to investigate. Richard Oakes was one of the seminal figures from Alcatraz. And if I’m right, that was kind of the beginning of the Trail of Broken Treaties. And would you talk about that a little bit?
Well, yeah. Richard was murdered by somebody. YMCA camptaker or something, caretakers of some respectable organization. And it was during that time the Trail of Broken Treaties, and what the Trail of Broken Treaties was really about was we were going to take Native people to Washington, because the decision had been made earlier that year that as AIM, the American Indian Movement, as aimed we were going to stand and face the Bureau of Indian Affairs, because whatever the sociall problems we were being confronted with, I mean, the American government this is about the laws called treaties, right. But the Bureau was the one that’s administering many of the programs, so this was really to take grassroots Native people to Washington. D. C. and we did it by caravan, the Caravan of Broken Treaties. And we had a twenty point position paper, which was saying how we felt that these treaties could be fulfilled. Ways that they could start to fulfill these treaties. Keep these legal agreements. And when agreements had been made with people in Washington DC, from the bureaucracy, that they would help us for housing and that they would do certain things, but when we got to DC then they didn’t do any of these things. So basically we’re in a situation where we’ve got all these people and we were inside the BIA building and we have all these people and really no place, no way to take care of them, so we just occupied the building. See and that was not the intent. There were some who went who wanted very much for that to happen. There were people who went there with the intention of occupying that building, but it would not have happened unless everybody had this need to make it happen. So there were people who didn’t go there with that intention at all, it just kind of hampened.
Now correct me if I’m wrong, I had always been told that you all went to black churches first. The only people that offered you shelter in Washington were black churches, but they were so funky that people couldn’t stay and that you were told to go to the BIA building and wait, and an auditorium was being prepared. And while you were there you were attacked by GSA officers.
See what happened was while we were there. See, I forget all the little things but what I do remember is yeah we were attacked. But what it was, see they were closing. It was time to close and they wanted us to leave. But by that time we were in the commissioner’s office relaxing, so you know,we weren’t gonna leave. Because there was no situation outside of there to adequately take care of us. It was a situation where we would be just hustling people and tire, you know. We had elders, we had all the ages from the old to the young. We were representative of the People.
And you were suddenly stuck in a federal building, in possession of a federal building, with all the files of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Were these at all useful?
They were to some people. Many files were taken out, yes.
Now, whatever happened to that twenty point position paper? Something I’ve always wondered.
Well, welcome to the group. I don’t know what happened to it. You know, I mean it’s still around. It was never acted upon, and it’s still around and I mean people can get access to it through websites, through whatever, but I mean, as far as being acted upon, nothing ever really came out of that.
Now at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, there was a press conference and there were basically three people that were kind of at that press conference and it was a Dennis Banks and Russell Means and Sid Mills, and this was kind of when the American Indian Movement came to prominence. Because Dennis and Russell kind of took that position. they sort of took the microphone, and they put kind of the stamp of the American Indian Movement over the occupation. I’m a little curious as to how you see the relationship of AIM to other Indian sovereignty issues where they come together and where they’re divergent, because I think a lot of people in the public think that AIM represents all Native struggles and issues. It’s sort of like the warrior arm. And is that true?
Well, I mean in a theoretical sense yes AIM does represent all Native struggles, but they’re not in charge of all Native struggles, they don’t call the shots because every Native struggle represents all Native struggles, so in that sense there’s not a separation. Can’t be separated. But a lot of times the AIM momentum, when it was the AIM momentum that was making everything move. Then in a way it got identified as being AIM.
Because it was useful.
Yes, because it was useful. And in a way AIM, you know, the American Indian Movement at that time it was its own organization. And had its own leadership or its own structure. And at that time you know because we were still identified, this is before we were Native Americans, we were still American Indians. So it was also an American Indian Movement in the sense of that, other groups did come into this umbrella in active times. And whatever personal attitudes and personality struggles come out of clash and things like that well that’s just human behaviour, right. But the overall thing was these things kind of had–you know, because that’s what I think made AIM so it may be difficult for the government, see, because number one, our legal position was one hundred percent proper. Because we were talking about the law, right, and they knew that, better than we understood it. We were saying it in the terms of treaties. And the other part, see we had a certain rigidity to us because we created as a national organization, but there was also a certain fluidity to it. Also, because we didn’t all answer to one another right. We got along for whatever reason. That didn’t necessarily mean we all hung out together and did all that stuff right. So we had room.
This is not something I know with my own eyes obviously, but I was always delighted, there was always a rumor that there was a suitcase with sixty-thousand dollars worth of cash.
Sixty-six thousand, five hundred dollars.
Why don’t you tell that story.
I’m gonna tell you, this is my version of it, right. My version of what happened here. I’m not going to name names, but I will give you my version. When this all happened, when the decision was made to negotiate with them for amnesty, alright, because that was one of the decisions that was made, alright, and a way out. And actually if I remember this correctly the government may have offered the idea of the way out. Money. To help get people out. And the figure ended up becoming sixty-five, whatever that figure was. And when it got to that, see, then these discussions because you got all these groups and people now jockeying for position. Want to get outta town.
Money does that.
Yeah, it does you know, and that’s why they gave it, right. So anyway, it got decided that this person was going to take this much of the money because they led this part of the caravan, and so then they would take care of people on the way back right. Other people had this attitude it should be divided differently, so I mean money does what it does, right. So that all went on and Bob Free gave me two thousand dollars and said go to the bank and make change for it. So I did. I changed it into mine and split. Took care of my people and got the hell out of Dodge. Because that’s what was going on, alright. Well, I brought people here. I didn’t want any of the money at the time, but I had people all the sudden under this system and it was being divided. There are going to be people that need help that aren’t gonna get it if they’re not with these main groups. So I got my people out of there, is exactly what I did.
So after DC, I get the names mixed up and you straighten it out, but I remember two shootings. I don’t remember the order. There was Yellowthunder and there was Bad Hand Bull. And I remember a bunch of people went from DC to Rapid City. I remember three white guys in a bar killed an Indian, made him dance, killed and put him in the trunk of a car. And they were acquitted by a jury. And a bunch of people, I think Russell went then to Gordon, Nebraska maybe.
Yeah AIM went.
So maybe tell us that story. Tell us what you remember about that. We’re moving us up toward the present.
See after we left the BIA building, this is when the Bad Hand Bull killing took place if I remember correctly, or Bad Heart Bull killings took place and yeah these guys got away with it, these white guys killed him and got away with it. And AIM came in to protest that and to deal with that. And at the same time on Pine Ridge, it’s very important see, the government had to let us go from the BIA building because see, they couldn’t take us on there because we were in a media capital, another Alcatraz, but this time it would have been much more. It would have been a different kind of Alcatraz, because they’d of had to fight us there. We didn’t have weapons, but we had our heart. And they’d had to fight us right there alright, so they made this other deal to get us out of there because they needed to get us into hostile territory where they could wage this war and now seriously go after AIM. Because AIM had embarrassed the Nixon Administration. See the stakes greatly elevated more than we had really understood at the time. So they started creating a certain environment in Pine Ridge. The FBI arrived in Pine Ridge January of ‘73 to train the police in counter subversive, anti-terrorism, whatever it is, they trained them. They started arming them and after the arrival of the FBI then the levels of violence started now to dramatically increase. The killings, all the violence increased after the FBI got there. So what they were doing as they were all drawing AIM in now because getting AIM tied up and locked up in a war out here in South Dakota, where nobody’s their ally.
Just to put it in perspective, 1974, the highest per capita murder rate in the United States was the Pine Ridge reservation.
So when all this was going on, the Bad Heart Bull killing happened. So anyway AIM was in Custer protesting what was going on and then there was a big confrontation, a fight. The court house was damaged in some kind of a way.
Burnt down.
No no the Chamber of Commerce building burnt down. So that happened and then it was not too long after that that the occupation of Wounded Knee started.
Right. Russell went to Custer City, South Dakota. The courthouse [was damaged], the building was burned. Then Pedro Bissonette if I remember, called the Oglala Civil Rights group called all around the country for help, and AIM was in the media because of the BIA takeover and they were publicizing issues on employment, fraudulent elections on the Pine Ridge reservation, there were government sponsored Bureau of Indian Affairs Police. Dick Wilson and the Goon Squad were killing campaign organizers. Basically what the Contras were doing in Guatemala and in Nicaragua, they were killing democratic workers. And there was a meeting and everybody said they were going to meet in Pine Ridge, but they didn’t. They went to Wounded Knee. So talk about the occupation of Wounded Knee.
Well, the occupation again was made to restate the conditions that now existed in Pine Ridge, the violence and just the government war that was being fought there, that was starting to be fought there. And it was again about the treaty, the treaty law, and once again, because the twenty point position papers also got pushed again during this occupation of Wounded Knee, and because this became a negotiation point later on. See the thing that I find the most interesting about Wounded Knee is that during the Wounded Knee occupation the TV Guide, which is the most widely read publication in America, in a TV Guide poll there were more Americans supported the AIM armed takeover of Wounded Knee than supported the existing government sitting in power at that time which was Richard Nixon. See and the thing I noticed out of Wounded Knee, this has got serious political implications to people like Nixon, to government in general. See, so we were waging whatever our struggle was from within Wounded Knee, because it turned into this fire fight, this long, prolonged, sporadic fire fight. You know, Frank Lee Clearwater was killed, Buddy LaMont was killed from our side. A marshall was paralyzed on the other side. You know, and many people were wounded. You know, so it was an occupation and everyone, all of the people in the occupation were completely surrounded by federal forces and the military was involved. I mean, it was a war, you know. Only it was in only whatever year that was, 1973, rather than 1873, and the war was just fought by the way it is now rather than what it was then because numbers changed, technology changed, but it was the basic same behavior pattern.
I mean, I think, for people who have come of age, let’s say in the since Reagan was President in the eighties, and through two terms of Bush, in two terms of Reagan, it probably seems incredible that twenty three year olds were standing off the federal government, and that Ah, people were out in the streets by the hundreds of thousands and millions protesting the war in Vietnam, And the government took us a lot more seriously. We didn’t know how powerful we were If we listened to Nixon’s tapes. They thought that we were organized and much more together than we were, and just to uh spread this out a little bit, John, at the same time, why don’t you just explain a little bit about, here Wounded Knee was a very symbolic act. Even though it was life and death, Alcatraz was a very symbolic act done to highlight the medical, political, legal issues. Why don’t you talk a little bit about the shootouts at Puyallup, or in Nisqually over the fishing rights, and like get down to some other bread and butter issues that were also going on in Native territories.
Well, from what I know about it, what I can rememer about it, cause I didn’t take part in that…
But you made bail for a lot of those people.
Yes. This would have been around the seventies. But what started happening up there around Nisqually Planks Landing was, this was going on like, if I remember it correctly, around the mid sixties before Alcatraz even happened, this struggle had started up there.
Over fishing rights. Why don’t you explain the issue a little bit.
Basically again, it’s back to the Treaties. The laws called Treaties. The people up in Washington had these treaty agreements, these legal agreements made with the government, right, about the fishing, their access to, the recognition of their right to live off the fishing and the hunting, and to do the resources in the way they would use them. But the state had basically passed laws saying that they couldn’t do it. So people died in that one. You know, Ellison Bridges. And it was a protracted one that went on for a long time. The best I can remember it went on for years before there was finally some type of a resolution.
The Boldt Decision right?
Yes, it was around the Boldt Decision actually that I think changed that.
Basically the Indians were given the right guaranteed by Treaty. These were people by the way, who were not always vanquished by warfare, sorry go ahead…
Not given the right. No, our right to do this was recognized.
The right to subsistence hunting and fishing came into direct conflict with sports fishermen and commercial fishermen, who objected to the percentage of the salmon run that they saw as a set aside to Native people, and this went on till the Boldt Decision, which basically upheld the right of the Puyallup people to fifty percent of the harvest, and then also finally gave the tribes a say on anything that impacted the purity of the river.
Recognized their say.
So, okay, okay, I’m trying to keep this all coherent. So let me ask you question. Why do you think it is that Indians seem to have achieved much more business autonomy and land recognition from Republicans under Nixon, Ford. The Taos Pueblo got Blue Lake back, The Yakama got Mount Adams, why is it that it seems consistently that a guy like Nixon was revered by the Toas people for giving back sacred land and they don’t get that kind of support from the Democrats.
Well, maybe we were raising more hell during the Republican years. [laughing]
Well, that’s an elegant and simple answer.
I don’t remember exactly when what happened, but I think in some ways, I don’t know because, see I’ve never really looked at one side giving us anything that’s going to be to our long term advantage that they don’t plan on taking away later in some way shape or form. So when a certain of these things happened, like I know when this happened around the land with Nixon, a part of it was because of the Alcatraz Occupation, right, because they didn’t want to recognize our right to have that land so they made concessions in other ways. Some of it was trade-off.
So now around this time the environmental movement was coming at the full swing after Kent State, a lot of people look at that as the beginning of the environmental movement, kind of gaining a firm ground in the white community and there’s a funny and oftentimes uneasy relationship, sometimes parallel sometimes conflictual between Indian culture and environmental community. For instance, there’s been a lot of conflict about the traditional taking of whales by the Makah People.
Sea Shepherd’s wrong.
Well, talk about it. Explain what it is.
The enviromentalists that opposed that and raised all this hell about it, you know, they’re wrong.
Well, I happen to agree, but explain the issue.
Because you know a part of the whole process of technologic civilization is to erase our memories to our ancestral past. It’s almost a way of spiritually severing us from our beginning. We no longer have those memories. And what Makah are talking about is hunting this way or doing this thing symbolically is something that their ancestors did, it keeps them linked physically as well as spiritually to their ancestral past, and this is where all of our knowledge and our strength as human beings comes from is from our ancestral past because it’s a spiritual relationship to reality. So these people that are environmonlists, they may be well intended and good intended, but you know they get lost in the political illusion of reality sometimes you know, and manifest that confusion. It may be well intended right, but the result is not coherent, you know, because whoever it is that wants to change us from being who we are, they’re wrong. I don’t care what the rationalization is.
Well, the environmental community is probably no more coherent than the Native community. There’s a radical conservative faction that says not one more whale. There’s another faction that’s kind of going to Native people and saying, teach us the right way to do it. What do you think about that?
Show some respect. That’s the right way to do it. Show some respect. Maybe we have to learn what that is, because that is the right way to do it. Show some respect. Maybe we have to learn how to show respect to ourselves in order to get what I’m saying, but it’s about showing respect. That’s really is the right way to do it in life is to show some respect. It is becoming so pervasive that people no longer remember what respect means. And I don’t know how to tell you, don’t dance this way or pray this way, I can’t say that because that’s not my position. See, but to me it’s like, it’s about showing some respect. I mean, that’s the ancestral reality. That’s how we as human beings lived in harmony with the Earth for so long. We showed respect.
So here we are. We’re sitting here in San Francisco. You’re wearing birkenstocks…
Actually they’re not, they’re O’ Sole Mio.
Whatever it is, we’re both, we’ve been kind of out there for a long time. I think a lot of people are probably wondering, what is an Indian? Is it blood? Is it philosophy? I’ve seen blond blue eyed guys that can’t speak English. I’ve seen full blooded Native people who can’t speak Souix. How do you think about that?
An Indian? You know words are sounds, right. It’s like a thought put into the vibratory world. Therefore, because it’s like a stone in the water, it has a meaning. See Indian is a mining word. That sound. That noise, because that particular sound is a noise. That noise was never heard on this hemisphere by my ancestors thirty generations ago. The never heard that sound. Indian. That sound Native American either. Or that sound, God, they didn’t hear any of these sounds. Those sounds, those noises, those sounds that became noises were never heard here. So Indian, this is a figment of someone’s imagination. Alright, because it’s almost like, see we have been invisible since the Europeans got here. We remain invisible today. In this sense, see we are human beings. We’re the people. This is what we told Columbus when he got off the boat, we’re the people, we’re the human beings. Columbus didn’t understand it. Because he was no longer a part of the descendants of tribe’s, it was no longer the perceptional reality, what it meant to be a human being or a people, because they were serfs and peasants and had been owned for a thousand years already. See so when we look at it here, so the history of the Indians, the reality of the Indian begins with the arrival of the Europeans. The only history the Indian has is one of genocide being waged against it. And now the history of the people of this land, the native people, then the history of the Indian is just a part. It’s something that can be endured and outlasted, because you know, the predatory world we’re in, this is the preditor we have to evolve a defence against. This kind of thing that has been after us for the last five, six hundred years. See, so Indians don’t exist. We’re the people, the human beings. So when people are fighting over who’s more Indian, say ok, well, swing away. You’re missing the point. That’s not who we are. And it’s very crucial because one of the purposes of technologic perceptional reality is to erase the memory. So if they change our identity, they’re erasing the memory. It’s an ancestral memory. See, that’s what happened to the tribes of Europe, because you know as long as we were tribes, no matter who we were or when we were tribes, we knew who we were. We knew what our purpose was. We had this memory. See but once the people lose their memory, their ancestral memory, once that memory is erased by civilization then the people find themselves powerless and they just don’t know how to deal. Become neurotic and messed up. Don’t know how to deal. Can’t put it back together, and I think erasing that ancestral memory’s got something to do with it. I think. you know, because to me we’re being mined. You know, I’m a human being. You’re a human being, everybody’s a human being. But the bone, flesh and blood of the human being, the DNA of the human being is made up of the metals, minerals and liquids of the Earth. We’re shapes of the Earth. Everything of the earth. Everyhing is a shape of the Earth, right, and we have being. Essence. Spirit. Everything of the Earth comes from the same DNA, has being and essence and spirit. And we live in a reality, a technologic perceptional reality, where we understand they can take the DNA of the earth, the metals, minerals, liquids, blood, flesh and bone of the earth that’s called uranium, and put it through a mining process and convert the being part that uranium into a form of energy. They do it with fossils, and we understand that. And and I think that what technological western civilization does, it mines the being part of human through its processes of domestication, whether it’s called patriotism, or religion, whatever the hell they call it, these are all just like big Earth movers in a way. They’re making a lot of noise. Just mining, mining, just creating disruption and confusion, so that we have no sense of balance within us. See and then it’s almost like chaos. What starts in an internal combustion engine. We’re running a system that is not there to take care of us, it’s not even concerned. See, we’re just disposable. We’re being mined. Calling us an Indian is a very important mining tool to their system.
You’ve been listening to a conversation between Peter Coyote and John Trudell.