Endgame Vol.1 (76 page)

Another difference between conversations now about stopping the culture versus those happening before is that civilization’s stranglehold over life has grown stronger. It’s always easier to stop invaders before they establish a beachhead, and it would have been a good thing had someone been able to warn the Indians not to trust and help the civilized. Maybe the Atlantic Ocean would have held them at bay for a lot longer, and without the resources from the Americas civilization might not have been able to keep expanding, and so might have collapsed. In any case, many of the pleas by Indians trying to get other Indians to join them in the fight stressed the need to strike soon, before the civilized became even more numerous and the world and its people so much weaker.

Well, we all know by now that the civilized have pretty much insinuated themselves into all the nooks and crannies. We’ve already discussed the number of soldiers and cops at the disposal of the rulers. And we can’t forget the technologies such as video cameras, DNA banks, predator drones, RFID chips, all of which increase the control by those in power. In some ways we’ll need a far bigger lever to stop civilization than we would have needed a couple of hundred years ago.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is that we might not. Civilization, with its relentless drive for standardization and absolute need to destroy diversity, has made itself extremely vulnerable to certain forms of attack. Any diverse system will by definition have far fewer bottlenecks, and those it does have will be far less crucial: diversity creates alternatives and leads to adaptability. If for some reason the salmon failed to return one season, the Tolowa could have eaten the abundant elk and even more abundant crabs and even more abundant lamprey. Standardized systems, while superficially more efficient, by their very nature are more susceptible to bottlenecks, and the bottlenecks they do have are far more constraining. By now, if oil supplies get cut off, the people who live in this occupied Tolowa territory will starve to death: the salmon, elk, crabs, and lamprey are gone, along with the knowledge of how to feed ourselves.
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Further, a globally interdependent
economy will, once again by definition, be subject to far more and greater bottlenecks. Remember all the fools it takes to cut down just one big tree. Break a link in this chain of fools (chain of supply), and the chainsaws will fall silent.

For all its fancy surveillance software and bunker buster bombs, for all the propaganda pumped continuously into our homes and into our hearts, for all the massive prison complexes waiting for when the propaganda systems fail, the whole system is, as we’ll explore in
Volume II
, far more vulnerable than it was at the time of Tecumseh, or than it has been at any time since its wretched beginnings. In its haste to control and destroy the world, civilization has handed us some very long levers, and pointed us toward some very well-placed and solid fulcrums. In case you are wondering, that’s a very good thing indeed.

I need to mention one more striking difference between arguments among the civilized and among the indigenous about whether to fight back. It’s an absolutely crucial difference: Only rarely do the indigenous argue on moral grounds against fighting back. Sometimes they’ll make moral arguments against fighting back in this or that case, because they feel the particular injuries they’re discussing do not merit a violent response, and some tribes are extremely pacifistic among themselves (and even sometimes among other tribes), but almost never do the indigenous attempt to argue that one should on moral grounds never fight back against someone—let’s be precise, kill someone—who is stealing your land and killing your people.

So far I’ve only found one clear example of an indigenous person counseling that one should never under any circumstances fight back. It’s an article written by a Cheyenne Chief named Lawrence Hart.
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Hart describes what he calls the Cheyenne Peace Tradition, the essence of which is, according to Hart, the following teaching: “If you see your mother, wife, or children being molested or harmed by anyone, you do not go and seek revenge. Go, sit and smoke and do nothing, for you are now a Cheyenne chief.” To make sure we get his point, he repeats this word-for-word (and bolded) seven times in less than four pages. He also describes the actions of three Cheyenne he suggests we should all strive to emulate. The first of these was Lean Bear, who went to Washington, D.C., to meet with Abraham Lincoln. For this he was given a “peace medal,” and documents that “would show that he was a friendly, that he had made a treaty with the United States. A peace treaty, if you will.” Soon after he got home, he was out riding with some other Cheyenne and came upon a column of soldiers. He
approached them. The soldiers shot him. He died clutching the documents showing he was a friendly. The second person we are supposed to emulate was White Antelope, who also had gone to D.C., and who also had received a peace medal. Lawrence Hart doesn’t mention whether White Antelope was holding this medal on the morning of November 29, 1864, as Colonel Chivington’s troops began the Sand Creek Massacre. White Antelope shouted in English at the white troops, “Stop! Stop!” This shouting worked no better at stopping the slaughter of Indians by whites than peace treaties had. When he finally realized the troops were attacking in earnest, he did not fight back, but folded his arms and sang his death song, “Nothing lives long/Except the earth/And the mountains.”
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The third person Hart wants us to emulate was also present at Sand Creek. Black Kettle somehow survived, and somehow continued to want to make peace with the whites. But he met the same end as the others, murdered along with his wife by Custer and the boys at the Washita massacre.

I have to be honest and tell you Hart’s examples didn’t compel me to want to become a moral pacifist,
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and I have to be even more honest and tell you that I found the notion of standing by while someone molests or harms one’s children or other loved ones to be profoundly immoral and irresponsible—despicable even. Many traditional Indians would have agreed. The response by Shawnees to members of their own tribe who refused to fight the whites
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was to sneer at their weakness and fright,
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to evince disgust and anger.
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Of one of those who wanted peace with the whites it was written that he “was generally considered to be an inconsequential chief with nothing of any great consequence between his ears, [who] was very inclined to attend the proposed peace treaty talks and wished to grasp the American offerings of peace irrespective of at what cost.”
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I didn’t, however, find Hart’s pacifism surprising, for two related reasons. The first was that the article was written in 1981,
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long after Black Hawk’s fears were realized, long after many Indians had taken on the mantle of their oppressors. The second reason has to do with how the mantle in this case manifests. Even more important to my understanding of Hart’s statements is the fact that he’s a Christian: a Mennonite pastor. The most direct (and so far only) argument I’ve seen for absolute moral pacifism by an Indian was written by a Christian.
Of course
.
Of course
a Christian would counsel pacifism and accommodation in the face of oppression.
Of course
a Christian would explicitly suggest that nothing be done to stop violence that flows down a hierarchy, even when this violence is done to one’s family.
Of course
a Christian would counsel that withdrawal and contemplation (sitting and smoking and doing nothing) are appropriate
and moral
responses to molestations and harms that could be stopped. That’s the point. A purpose of Christianity is and always has been to rationalize submission to those in power. Those in power conquer under the sign of the cross, while the rest of us count on getting our rewards in heaven. Or maybe we’ll get some rewards here: If only we’re meek enough, we’re told, with a barely perceptible smile and the hint of a wink, we may someday get to inherit (the wreckage of) this world.

Now, I could understand Hart’s story and teachings if he presented them as simply one part of a community’s spiritual life, a part that is necessary to the health of the community, but no more nor less necessary than appropriate counsel for war, appropriate counsel for hunting, for child rearing, for where to place your communal latrines. The Shawnee, for example, had five clans, each of which served functions for the Shawnee as a whole. Two clans dealt with political matters both within and without the tribe, one dealt with matters of health and medicine, one with spiritual matters, and one provided the majority of warriors and war chiefs.
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They all worked together. Further, I can see how it’s appropriate for people to think clearly under as many circumstances as possible (but where does feeling enter Hart’s description?), and I can see how it may be appropriate for some people in the community to attempt to think clearly and contemplatively under all circumstances, even the most personally trying. And I can see how others in the community may serve other roles, as appropriate. But it is simplistic, absurd, unrealistic, unnatural, and just plain incorrect to suggest, as Hart seems to,
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that absolute pacifism is a better, more effective, more moral, or more adaptive way to structure a community, or that it is an appropriate response to the deathliness of civilization. It is also simply untrue to ascribe universal moral pacifism to the Cheyenne. Certainly the famous Cheyenne fighter Roman Nose (Woo-Kay-Nay or Arched Nose) would have been surprised to learn that the Cheyenne were or are moral pacifists. So would the Cheyenne who fought alongside Red Cloud, and those who fought alongside Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. Far from being in any way pacifistic, the Cheyenne had at least seven full-fledged military societies: the Kit-Fox Men (Woksihitaneo); Red Shields (Mahohivas); Crazy Dogs (Hotamimasaw); Crooked Lance Society (Himoiyoqis), known by the ethnohistorian George Grinnell as the Elks; Bowstring Men (Himatanohis); Wolf Warriors (Konianutqio); and the famous Dog Soldiers (Hotamitaneo).
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In fact, instead of disproving my point about traditional indigenous peoples not advocating absolute moral pacifism, I think instead Lawrence Hart’s article—given his Christianity—supports it.

Having said all this, I think we all know the real reason behind the paucity
of speeches in support of moral pacifism by the indigenous, which is that absolute moral pacifism is a product of civilization. It is, as we’ll soon explore in
Volume II
, a response by the exploited to their trauma. It is an unnatural state. It is a state that is nurtured by exploiter and victim alike, to perpetuate their exploitative and destructive relationship.

Twaddle, rubbish, and gossip is what people want, not action. . . . The secret of life is to chatter freely about all one wishes to do and how one is always being prevented—and then do nothing.

I WENT TO SEE
STAR WARS
WHEN I WAS IN FIGH SCHOOL, WHICH SEEMS about the right time to see it. I liked it a lot. I wasn’t one of those people who saw it a hundred times or anything. I wasn’t
that
much of a nerd. Besides, I was too busy playing
Dungeons and Dragons
. I saw it again recently. It’s not so good as I remember. In fact it’s pretty bad. The characters are flat, the dialog hokey, the acting nondescript. But I still loved the ending, where Luke remembers to “use the force” to blow up the Death Star. For those of you who may have forgotten, the Death Star (according to the official
Star Wars
website) “was the code name of an unspeakably powerful and horrific weapon developed by the Empire. The immense space station carried a weapon capable of destroying entire planets. The Death Star was to be an instrument of terror, meant to cow treasonous worlds with the threat of annihilation. While the massive station is evidence of the evil that was the Galactic Empire, it was also proof of the New Order’s greatest weakness—the belief that technology and terror were superior to the will of oppressed beings fighting for freedom.” That’s all pretty interesting stuff, and of course applicable to the discussion at hand: civilization as Death Star.

The website also says, “The Death Star was a battle station the size of a small moon. It had a formidable array of turbolasers and tractor beam projectors, giving it the firepower of greater than half the Imperial Starfleet. Within its cavernous interior were legions of Imperial troops and fightercraft, as well as all manner of detention blocks and interrogation cells. The Death Star was spherical, and dark gray in color. Located on the Death Star’s northern hemisphere was a concave disk housing the station’s main laser weapon. . . . In a brutal display of the Death Star’s power, Grand Moff Tarkin targeted its prime weapon at the peaceful world of Alderaan. [Rebel princess] Leia Organa, an Imperial captive at the time, was forced to watch as the searing laser blast split apart her beloved world, turning the planet and its populace into orbital ash and debris.” I’m not sure if you feel a stab of recognition at being a captive of the empire, forced to watch your beloved world and its (human and nonhuman) populace turned into orbital ash and debris. I do.