First up I would like to thank you all for having me here, and I’m really glad to be here. I’ve lived many lives in my lifetime but I have a very deep connection to Nevada. Because part of my life experience unfolded in Nevada. And the way things were during that time. I got to interact with the tribes of Nevada directly and indirectly.
So I’m going to try to be as coherent as I can. Make as much sense as I can. But I’m gonna tell you starting right off, you know I’m kind of crazy. And I want you to understand that from the beginning so that if I say something that you don’t agree with or we have a difference of opinion about, I’d like it to just be considered.
I was thinking, you know, the idea of community awareness. And you know, how far does that really go. Community awareness. Because when I look at it sometimes I feel as though I’m in a dimension where we don’t really understand and recognize who we are anymore. And this transcends race and culture and everything to me. It’s like we’re forgetting that we’re human beings. You know, we’re human beings. And it’s like we’re forgetting that we’re human beings. We don’t participate in this reality from the perception of human beings. We don’t think like human beings, you know. We don’t feel like human beings. We feel oppressed, victimized and a whole lot of other things but we’re not really, connected.
I started out of the activist community in the ’70s and whatever programs we have now, we didn’t have then. And in my own mind, in my own point of view what happened in the ’70s with the activists period of time, whether it was the fishing rights struggle, which was in the sixties and seventies out of the northwest, or it was Alcatraz or AIM, what was going on in the local communities. This period produced a lot of what we have now. So we have more programs and more services and more things of this nature now than we had before that activist period. So on one hand things are gained, better in that kind of a way, but yet when I turn around and I look at what’s going on in our communities, you know, what’s going on with our youth and I look at the negatives, whether it’s from speed, alcohol, and just the way the poverty spreads and how it’s affecting the young people. Then it tells me well, something’s missing. No matter what we’ve accomplished, something is missing. Because this problem continues to spread through the generations no matter how good our intentions have been, it’s still there. And it’s spreading more. It’s spreading faster now than it did when we were young. And I Try to think what is it, you know, what’s missing here? And so the best I can come down to is what’s missing is how we perceive reality. This is where, to me, something’s out of synchronicity. It’s in how we perceive reality. Because everything that we’ve done to make better things in our community, whether it’s in the native community or the outside community, everything that we’ve attempted to do, we did it through the system. We did it through the motions. We did it the way that you’re supposed to do it. Even when it was that political rebellion that was going on in our generation, because that political rebellion of my generation was more than just the Natives, it was all the young who were rebelling. And they were rebelling because we had a higher ideal and we wanted a fair shake for everybody. And so we went through the system. We did whatever we did in order to make a better situation, but the situation never really got better. And so what I’m saying, I think has to do with our perception of reality. I think that we have to think differently. I think we need to out-think them. See we’re not out-thinking them. Whoever they may be.
I’m gonna go to this who we are and our own power as individuals. See we’re human beings. And our relationships to the reality of power comes from that reality. The reality that we are human beings. And as human beings, our bone, flesh and blood, we’re made up of the metals and minerals and liquids of the earth. We are literally shapes of the earth, and we have being. All things of the earth are made up of the same metals, minerals and liquids. So all things of the earth are shapes of the earth. We are shapes of the earth, all things of the earth, the shapes of the earth, we have being. All things of the earth have being. And that being comes from our relationship to the Sun, sky, universe. Being. Human beings. All things have being. And our power. Our power as human beings is that reality. We are human beings. We are part earth and we are literally part sky, the being part, the energy, the spirit. And our power is being human beings.
As human beings, creator gave us life as human beings. And then creator gave, as a part of that life, creator gave us intelligence. See, life without intelligence in our form would be pointless. So we were given life with intelligence, these two things go together. Life with intelligence. We manifest our reality with our intelligence. We manifest our reality by how we have either been taught or programmed to perceive reality. We are human beings.
Now, our relationship to power. Alright now, we know all things of the earth are made up of the same things, all things of the earth have being. All my relations. So we know they can take uranium, the being, the uranium part of the earth, and fossil fuels out of the earth and put it through a mining-refining process and convert its being into a form of energy to run their systems. Well what technologic industrial civilization does is, it mines the being part of human, through how it programs the human to perceive reality through its intelligence. And then it converts the being part of human into a form of energy to run its systems. This is about power. This is about the reality of power. Now when you take the uranium and you mine, and you change the being of the uranium and the fossils, they mine and put it through this refining process it creates poison and toxic waste. When they mine the being part of human through how they imprint the human to perceive reality it leaves behind poison and toxic waste. And this poison and toxic waste, these are the fears, the doubts and the insecurities that become part of our perception of reality. And when that happens to us, then we start to perceive reality from the perception of our inabilities. Basically we’re participating in a reality from the perception of our inabilities. So this is the poison and toxic waste that’s left over from mining the being part of human through how you program the human to perceive reality.
Now, power. Have you ever had a situation where you felt powerless? And when you’re feeling that you’re most powerless, how bad can you make yourself feel? And then how does this affect the people around you? See, if you make yourself feel bad and you can affect the people around you in that process then that means you have power. So whatever is going on in this reality it isn’t about an absence or lack of power, it’s not. What’s going on in this reality is we’ve been imprinted and programmed to perceive reality in such a distorted way that we use our own power against ourselves.
So we use our power. This isn’t about us not having power, this is an issue of us having power that is used incoherently and chaotically. But it’s not an issue of us not having power. So we’ve been imprinted to perceive reality alright in an incoherent chaotic way. Now if we understood, to take this same power of our intelligence and head it in a direction of using it clearly and coherently as we possibly can, we would create another power. We will create another energy. Because in my opinion, whatever we’re going to do for our awareness, we really need to just consider that we are human beings and we need to consider bringing real thinking to the table. We need to start thinking about how to deal with the situation that we’re confronted with. I mean really thinking.
You know this mining process, the way this mining process works. Everything’s about energy. Everything is about power. Everything is about energy. So when we think, we project electromagnetic thought. Energy, that’s what thought is. The electromagnetic energy and scientific terms truly project this energy, electromagnetic energy, when we’re thinking. Power. Energy. So energy is supposed to flow. It’s supposed to go, it has its own momentum and its own way of doing things. And the mining process, we are imprinted to perceive reality through believing this thinking. We’re not taught to think. We’re programmed to believe. We’re not taught to think. We’re programmed to believe. We’re programmed to believe that believing is thinking. But when under that program, alright, see believing has its limits, it has its walls, it has its prejudices. Believing. It’s a box. So when we’re programmed to believe rather than talk, to think, we’re taking that energy of thinking and we’re putting it in a box. We’re confining it in a stressful situation. So we’re not really thinking our way through. We’re not really thinking of solutions you know, because we believe. So for us, understanding our own power, the power of our intelligence, I think it’s very crucial that somewhere in this process that we start to think about some of these things, especially the younger generations, to understand the power of their own intelligence. The value of their intelligence.
Because when I look at what’s going on within this technologic mining reality, I think one of the things that it does, the whole objective, is to erase our identity. To erase our identity as human beings. And it has many ways of working to erase our identity as human beings. Erase the ancestral memory. Erase the understanding of the ancestral memory. And this stuff happens in stages. It happens in stages as they do this kind of a process against us. Because when we look within our own realities, within our own community, if we look clearly and coherently. If we love objectively. If we recognize reality, what is going on around us, you know, our understanding of our way of life is diminishing. And it is. And each generation, the way this thing works, and each generation the understanding of our ancestral reality diminishes because there is less people to have that understanding. It’s more than to just know the ceremonies. And it’s more than just know the ritual. And it’s more than just knowing the language. It’s about a way of perceiving reality. It’s about a way of thinking. It’s about a way of thinking. Ancestral. We need to think and plan our next generations about being human beings and what that means because that’s what we really are.
You know, in our ancestral lineage our oldest memory is as human beings, you know, and every human being is a descendant of a tribe. Every human being is the descendant of the tribe. So what happened to the native peoples here when the descendants of the tribes of Europe got here, happened to the descendants of the tribes of Europe. What they did to us when they got here was the same thing that had been done to them for 1,500 years before they got here. So it was the only way they knew how to behave. See, they no longer remembered being a human being. That all had been taken out. They’ve been property, and fiefdoms, and serfdoms, and peasants and all of this kind of a thing, so that memory of being a human being had been erased. But at one time they perceived reality the same way our ancestors did. The earth is the mother. This is a spiritual reality that we’re in. It’s not about a material physical reality, we’re in spiritual reality.
This is about an evolution of being. And the evolution of being is in what kind of balance we keep in our human form in this spiritual reality. And by the time these descendants of the tribes got here in the 1400s they no longer remembered they were human beings. And when they asked our first ancestors who we are, we said we’re the human beings. We’re the People. And so they went about calling us Indians because they thought they were in India. It was really about calling us Indians because they no longer knew what it meant to be a human being, they didn’t recognize that reality anymore.
So as human beings we have a way of saying and identifying who we are in our own language. In our own language we have our own name for who we are and usually it always comes back to the people, or the human beings. In every one of our languages we have a way of saying who we are. But when this other thing, the descendants of the tribes of Europe, came here with their predatory mindset, they called us Indians. And the history of the Indian began. See the only history that Indians have is one of genocide and terror. It’s one of behavior modification, murder, theft, that’s the only history that Indians have. We have no other history. But as the human beings and the People we have a history that goes way beyond the arrival, alright, way beyond the false identity of Indian. But through this mining process the more the Indian identity takes hold in our consciousness, then the more we forget. It’s like a spiritual severance from our ancestral past because our ancestors never heard the word Indian. Our ancestors never thought of Indian. Our ancestors never made the sound Indian. Our ancestors were always the human beings. So as they impose this new created identity on us, and it’s an identity of trauma and terrorization, we get pushed into a corner of trying to defend a part of an identity, not the reality of who we really are. To defend the identity that they imposed upon us.
I was out with a woman named Anna Mae Aguash and a women named Navajo Lynn down at Chaco National Monument in New Mexico thirty, thirty-five years ago. And I remember walking through those ruins of those pueblos because I was part of an activist movement. We were unity and all that, but I remember going through those things. I saw all they had built there and they didn’t have any of this technology. I saw that and I thought these people really understood. This could never happen, they could not have created this reality without complete and total cooperation and consensus. Thinking like human beings. And for us, whatever it is that we’ve got to deal with, I think this has to come back. Because it’s what they’re taking. You know it’s like, we are not our ancestors. We are the descendants of our ancestors and it’s dangerous for us to pretend that we are our ancestors, alright, and that we have all the knowledge of our ancestors, because we don’t.
Collectively we all have fragments of the original memory and collectively we have all of this knowledge but it’s going to take cooperative understanding to be able to put this back together. Because the danger that I see the most is that they’re going to take the understanding away. You know it’s like, we’re gonna know certain things but they’re going to take the understanding away. It’s like, do I know how to work the TV? Yeah I know you plug it in and you turn it on. Do I understand? No. Don’t have a clue. Alright, well, the way the next phase of this thing is, because as each generation passes…they know the surface parts of the ceremony, the rituals, but the understanding is becoming diminished. Because that’s what they want to separate us from, is the understanding of the human being. You know it’s a fine line thing to deal with because, you know, I was a part of movement their whole notion was Indian Proud. We did everything we could possibly do to establish that idea. But now when I look back on it, I think it’s time to evolve now. That was necessary for that time frame and that space.
But you know, we’re not Indians. We’re human beings. And our tribes, we have our own name for who we are. We have a history and lineage that goes way back, you know, when you look at the Indian part of our evolution it’s only five hundred years. When you look at the reality of our ancestry, you know, this is thousands and thousands of years. So as human beings if we remember we’re human beings we can outlast this thing. But if we take the identity that they have imposed upon us we’re not going to outlast it because somewhere in that identity imposed upon us we stopped thinking, feeling, and behaving like human beings.
We now start to react to the trauma and the frustrations that have been put into our consciousness by the genocide. So about clearing our minds. Understanding our reality to the connection of power is in the clear coherent use of the power of our intelligence. You know, we’re programmed to believe that the more money we get the more powerful we get. But that’s not true. See the more money we get, that gives us access to authority. We’re programmed to believe that through voting we get power. That’s not true. That’s about access to authority. We’re programmed to believe, to follow this religion will give us power. But that’s not true. That’s about submitting. It’s about submitting to these religions, and they will give us access to power, but that’s not true. That’s about authority. And authority and power are two different things. But if we believe those things represent the reality of power then we’ll never recognize and understand our own power because we don’t control those things.
Power. Power is something that authority has to adjust to. Power. Power is a blizzard. Power is a prairie fire. Power is an earthquake. Power is a hurricane. Power is individual human beings thinking clearly and coherently. Individual human beings thinking clearly and coherently turns it into collective human beings thinking clearly and coherently, and this is power. This is the power our ancestors had. This is the power our ancestors understood. But our ancestors, when they had this and they understood this, they had not been traumatized like we have.
My opinion about tradition, and trying to find our tradition, and I see quarreling and fighting about who’s more this, who’s got more, right, but you know to me that’s a sign of losing our consciousness as human beings. Because tradition, the ancestral tradition, is based on, we are in spiritual reality. Life is not about freedom. Life is about responsibility and we take responsibility for the gift of intelligence and life that we will know how to be free. Life is about, we are borrowing the present from the past as well as the future. See our ancestors understood that this is what power really is. This is our responsibility. This is our role. It comes down to one word. It’s about respect. Our oral tradition is based upon respect. Our ancestral traditions are based upon respect. Now with their coming, they’ve influenced how the ceremonies go by us having to hide and do them. The religious indoctrination, everybody alters a little bit here and there and we get busy trying to fight and protect these kinds of things in the name of respect and tradition. In the names of protecting our traditions. But tradition is based upon respect and no matter what kind of predatory evolution we have to go through, we respect and evolve with that. Our understanding can evolve with that. See, but the deal is we have to recognize that we’re human beings because if we don’t respect ourselves then how can we really show respect. I mean, our intentions, our motives, a lot of stuff all right, can happen here, but tradition is based upon respect. And whatever we go through, the language has changed, different things, behavior patterns have changed, but respect is respect. And that does not change.
So as we look at finding our way back I think that we really need to understand this more. In our ancestral reality as human beings life was a gift, you know, and so when we were born into this physical reality, it was like an exchange of gifts. The gift of life to life. And then when we passed and went on to the next reality it was like a gift. But really it’s the gift of being back to being. We’re human beings, being just is, it always is. So we’re humans temporarily. We’re beings temporarily being human and then we go back to being. See it’s about an evolution of being.
But anyway, in the ancestral reality, life is a gift. But in the religious reality they told us there was something wrong with us. They told us the lie of original sin. They told us because of original sin that there was something wrong with us. We had to submit and obey them. They programmed us to believe that submitting and obeying them was taking responsibility for a crime that we didn’t commit.
Think about your own individual life, when it sunk in that it was something wrong with us. That was the planting of the seed, to get us to behave and perceive reality the way they want us to. We were always being told there was something wrong with us. And at some point in there we get a trauma, something comes along and just traumatizes us. It’s not our fault, but we blame ourselves for it and then as a result of that we create behavior patterns where we go through these behavior patterns repeating some form of the trauma and continue to judge and blame ourselves. This is how they keep us muddled.
Reality is, there is nothing wrong with us. Wrong things have happened to us. And when wrong things happen to us, we’re going to react. We’re going to create a behavior pattern, a reaction, in effect to what happened to us that was wrong. But they programmed us with original sin and that we’re guilty so that means we’ve been programmed to judge. ~