Brendan Lorber: You’ve said you felt you were knocked unconscious when you were born and have spent your entire life trying to come to. What techniques have you called upon become more aware?
John Trudell: I never thought in terms of technique. There are some things I can’t explain. I went through my life experiences and at a young age things just didn’t seem right to me. I was always influenced by that and as different things have happened in my life I thought about them a lot, maybe out of necessity. It’s apparent to me that the reality that’s being imposed upon us, something’s not right about it. It’s almost like this is not real, what reality’s supposed to be all about. My mind goes off with these kind of things but I’ve never thought in terms of any technique. I just do what I do.
Everyone from the FBI to Kris Kristofferson says you are dangerous – who are you dangerous to and why?
[laughs] I’m not dangerous. But when Kris says it and the FBI says it they’re saying it two different contexts. In the FBI’s context… well I don’t think I’m dangerous to anybody or anything. It’s just that I see reality as I see it, I think the way that I think and I speak the way that I speak. If there’s anything in this area that’s dangerous – which I truly don’t understand — it’s got to be about perceptions of reality. I’ll put it like this: I have my moments of coherence, I can be very coherent at times, this isn’t a full-time thing, but I can be very coherent at times. I think that’s what’s being perceived as dangerous, because the system itself, not just the FBI, they don’t want people using their intelligence clearly and coherently and really thinking about things. They want people to just believe what they’re told because if people are busy believing then they’re obviously not thinking. It’s about perceptions of reality.
My next question touches on those perceptions of reality. What are you able to achieve as a poet and musician that you were not able to achieve as an activist? That is, how do the goals of being an activist differ from those of being an artist – and how are they the same?
When I was an activist, when that was my identity, it wasn’t a goal. It was just something I felt I had to do. It seemed that the only realistic thing for me to do at that time was to be involved in the activism. But when that changed and I became involved in the writing and the performance and what is called the artist thing, one of the main things I noticed in the transition is that I was more free. That’s because the political activism thing is a very limited way to view reality. When I had the activist identity, I was perceiving reality as a political activist. That’s a limiter, it was putting blinders on. I could only see what was going on based upon my political activism and when you get right down into the reality of politics, and what it really is all about, politics is very territorial, very competitive, very aggressive. It’s based upon beliefs and party lines. It has its own extremism. No matter how good or righteous the cause is, whether from the left to the right, or the Indians to the whites it doesn’t matter. Politics is aggressive in nature and competitive. It’s non-cooperative. So when I had a political identity, I was limiting my ability to see what was really going on in a larger context. When I looked at us as native people, this political activism served a useful function. But in the long run it wasn’t our politics. And if it’s not our politics then how can we use it to speak our truths and our realities. We can blurt out a lot of repressed emotional frustration but venting repressed emotional frustration has absolutely nothing to do with coherence. So when the change went over and I started writing I realized I could express my truths the way I want to. And that’s what’s needed now. It gave me peripheral vision that I didn’t have.
That notion of identity lead into the next thing I wanted to touch on. You’ve said, “Some people call me a poet. Others say I’m an activist. Some say my poetry and music is political. Others say it’s about the spirit of my people. I don’t buy into any of those labels. I may be a little bit of all those things, but I’m more than any of them. We all are. That’s what makes us human.” How do people get pushed into those specific limiting identities?
It starts at birth, the programming. We are human beings. That is who we are. That is our identity, each and every one of us. That is our identity. We may be female or male or we may be one race or another but we’re human beings. That is our identity. Everything else is how we’re dressed up. But from the time we’re born, we’re programmed to not perceive reality as human beings. We’re programmed to perceive reality by race, gender, religion, guilt. The purpose of that programming is to create chaos in our thought process. It’s to confuse our real identity. As long as that chaos and confusion exists then we can be manipulated. Our anarchy can be manipulated to serve someone else’s purpose.
Continuing with that, the civil rights and American Indian Movements were viewed as threats by the US government in part because they were bridging communities that had been kept apart for a long time. Your work as an activist and a writer connects the fight against racism, sexism and classism, yet many activists and writers view each as a separate battle. Why do so many people want to divide the issues into smaller parcels?
We are programmed to do that. We’re addicted to that energy pattern.
You’ve said “most people are trying to find solutions to the problem within the confined abstractions of democracy and if they’re not willing to think objectively about responsibility to our descendants then they will come up with no solutions – they will only perpetuate the enslavement and feed it.” How can a person break out of their programming, out of that cycle?
We need to respect the value and power of our intelligence. We need to use our intelligence to think. We need to think clearly and coherently. We need to activate and understand the power of our intelligence and if we would use our intelligence clearly and coherently we will break out of that. But as a society were not using our intelligence clearly and coherently. We use our intelligence to be fearful, to be insecure, to believe. We believe, we don’t think. We’ve been programmed to believe so the effectiveness of our intelligence has been neutered. Instead of us using the power of clear and coherent thinking we’ve been neutered down to where we just use our intelligence to believe what we’re told to believe. You can’t really think and believe at the same time – it’s one or the other, because if you just believe you’re pretending to think. When you’re just believing, your pretend-thinking is limited by the definitions of your belief. The power of our intelligence, the energy of our intelligence, the power that it represents, it needs to flow. We need to understand the value and power of our intelligence and use it clearly and coherently. An example of the power of our intelligence is if you’ve ever had the experience of feeling powerless, overwhelmed and depressed. How bad can you make yourself feel when you’re feeling that way? How does it affect the people around you? The irony there is you’re feeling powerless but in reality that is power. The worse you can make yourself feel – that’s power, that’s your power. And how it affects the people around you is the physical side of how your power spreads. We really need to come to grips with reality. What I’m getting at is, if we understand and respect the power of our intelligence and use it clearly and coherently then that power that we use to make ourselves feel bad, that power can be used to create coherence. In dealing with beliefs — and I’m not saying that to have beliefs is bad – but what I am saying is to use the word believe and use it all the time is a negative because it stifles our thinking. The people, whoever they believe their creator is, whether it’s God or Yahweh or Mohammed or Allah or The Great Spirit, whoever people relate to as a creator, we need to show respect to that creator. We can make all the rah rah words about a spiritual this or whatever we can rah rah ourselves all we want but the reality is, if we truly respect our creator, we would respect the gift of intelligence that our creator gave us and use that gift appropriately. Clearly and coherently. It’s in our best interests to reach that realization. We’ve been so confused, disoriented and disconnected, we’re not showing our creator respect no matter how much we rah rah. We can drop on our knees and pray at the drop of a hat we can rah rah everything. But if we’re not using the gift of our intelligence clearly and coherently were not fulfilling our responsibility to the life that our creator gave us. It comes down to this: recognizing who we are and what our own power is. I don’t have a manual or a step by step process on how one goes about this. But I think the first step in going about it is for us to make a decision within our own selves, “I’m going to use the power of my intelligence to be as clear and coherent as I possibly can. I’m going to think. I choose thinking over believing.” and head in that direction, because it’ll activate.
In some ways the US government has been acting more overtly, as though they’re making it easy to use our intelligence to see the economic injustice and military oppression around the world.
People aren’t using their intelligence to do that. They’re seeing it, but if people were truly using their intelligence they would deal with it. We have to watch out for the slight of mind. I don’t think the US government is more overtly doing it now. From how I view reality, they’ve been very overt the whole time, it’s just that people don’t want to see it. What’s happening here and why I’m saying it like this is that were not activating our intelligence clearly and coherently by what were seeing. We’re emotionally reacting to what we believe. But we’re not thinking in ways to create solutions. Let’s say, using your terminology, they may be more overt in what they’re doing. The people who are for it react out of their beliefs and they support it however they support it. The people who are against it emotionally react out of their beliefs. We go through these motions to act out our emotional reactions but if you look at it historically speaking we haven’t produced any results. We haven’t settled the issues. The missing thing here is using our intelligence clearly and coherently in facing reality. We’re still within the limits of the abstractions of democracy. Either we’re going to serve humanity, either we’re going to be respectful to our creator and create a more balanced reality or were going to be loyal to some dark age belief system that was imposed upon us. We need to think beyond the way we’ve been programmed to believe because the way reality stands right now, you can’t save democracy and save humanity. You can’t do it. If you look at it practically speaking, why would you want to save democracy? Democracy in reality means the right of the entitled to rule. But who decides who’s entitled? In an ownership of property world, the entitled will always be the ones who own the property. That’s just reality. I’m not advocating this — the only thing I’m advocating is that we use the power of our intelligence to really look at reality very clearly if we want to produce coherent solutions. When I look at where the situation stands now, and I came through the 60’s, I’m talking about how come nothing’s changed? How come the beast is worse now than when we started out? Our intentions were good, so what’s missing? I think the missing link is we didn’t really think – we reacted. And that’s the shift that has to be made now. We’ll see…
That programming goes back a long way. Back when colonial leaders first showed up here.
It goes back to the fucking Romans, to the Pharoahs, man. It goes way, way back.
But the techniques have been similar all along, of pitting different groups against each other.
Yes.
Like a few hundred years ago it was African slaves versus white indentured servants versus Native Americans so none of them would band together against the ruling class. The same strategy more recently in Vietnam and Iraq where soldiers have more shared interests with the people they’re shooting than with the people who sent them over. But it’s very difficult to overcome the misplaced allegiance and manufactured, artificial fear that’s placed in people.
It’s difficult to overcome it, but the way it gets done is one individual at a time makes up their mind, “I’m going to be as coherent as I possibly can.” And we’ll get there, because the change we’re looking at has to happen in an evolutionary context, not a revolutionary context. There is no revolutionary solution. Revolution just means you spin back to your staring point. Oppressor oppressed. A revolution always goes back to its starting point but evolution is more linear. It continues on its own circular manner so to speak, or maybe its all about spirals [laughs]. Evolution continues on and we are a part of evolutionary reality. If we make decisions that we are going be as clear and coherent as we can, we’ll see where we’re at in a couple of years. The power of depression can affect the people around you, well the power of coherence can also affect the people around you. We’ll just replace the power of depression with the reality of coherence one individual at a time and power will spread.
One way is through the use of language. Corporations and governments have always recognized the power of language to control people. They’ve used it to separate populations from the accurate perception of their surroundings. For example, by making corporations rather than humans the subject of terms like health, growth and efficiency, they have masked what would more accurately be described as profit, hegemony and exploitation. It becomes difficult to even conceptualize a world in which the well being of people is the priority. Resisting that corruption of language and reconnecting it to its human and environmental origins – has that been in your mind as you’ve gone forward as a writer?
No. [laughs] Not really. I’m not surprised by anything that they do. They’re doing nothing new. Historically speaking they’re doing what they’ve always done. To have a small minority ruling class feed off the larger mass. There’s nothing new going on here. The technology, the terminology and the generations change but the system remains the same. So I’m not surprised by anything that they’re doing. I just started writing because it happened. There was no thought where “I see things more clearly.” There was no thought of nothing. I started writing because it happened and I just follow it. I can’t take any credit. I just went where my life took me, all right. In that attempt to become conscious I just followed where life took me. That’s exactly in the end what happened.
That’s the way interesting things happen. Rather than coming to some conclusion beforehand and making it fit. Just allowing it to emerge.
One of the things I learned out of it though that I think is a step in the direction is: knowing isn’t enough. Knowing isn’t enough. It’s understanding what we know. That’s the piece that seems to be missing. We were programmed in school to memorize and to know how to be able to come up with the right answer. Whether we understood or not, that wasn’t important to them. The only thing that was important to them was that we understood to go along with the program. It was actually important to them that we didn’t understand what the program really was. So whatever’s going on here, knowing isn’t enough. Understanding what we know is very important but we can only reach that understanding through clear and coherent use of our intelligence.
What poets, artists, activists or other people continue to inspire you and lead you in new directions?
Well, that’s a hard one to answer because I don’t want to say names and leave out names. Willie Nelson is one. He’s a big influence.
How does he inspire you?
He – and Kris Kristofferson’s another one, and Jackson Browne – because they see reality. They understand what’s going on. Things like that, I like. There’s a lot of stuff I listen to that I maybe don’t remember the name. I wouldn’t say I’m hearing a lot, but I’m hearing more and more by different artists that’s heading in the right direction. But I’d say Willie because I just like his style. ~