Songs of the Dead (17 page)

“Allison,” I say.

I want to go back to the car, but I can't turn away. I hear bullets fly past. I wonder
, Can these bullets hit me? If one hits me, will
I die?
I wonder,
Can they hit Allison, even though she doesn't see them
?

But then I stop thinking, because I see a man running toward me. He's an Indian. He wears a white buckskin shirt and a tanned skin hat. He comes closer, and closer still. He doesn't see me. I hear a shot, see a red rose appear on the breast of his shirt. He stumbles, rights himself, keeps running. Closer and closer he comes. The rose expands. He slows, sways, stands not a foot from me. He looks me in the eye. I cannot move.

I say, “I—”

The rose gets larger. He reaches with both hands, grabs my shoulders, says something to me in a language I don't understand.

I want to help him, but I don't know what to do. I search his eyes as he searches mine. He falls. I watch him die at my feet.

And then he's gone.

Finally I take a step back, turn to face Allison. There are no more gunshots, only the sounds of cars on the interstate. Without a word she comes to hold me. I start to cry.

But I don't learn my lesson. We try again, another picnic, another day. This time we drive east of Spokane, to the Idaho border. We stop, get out of the car. I don't fall through time. We walk away from the road, find a nice spot near the river, put down a blanket, lay out the food: fried chicken, biscuits, and jojos. We bought the jojos, and Allison cooked the chicken and biscuits. They're good. Had I cooked them, the chicken would have been dry, the biscuits tasteless and hard.

After lunch we sit, Allison cross-legged watching ants in the grass, me leaning slightly back, legs extended. I'm looking far away, at nothing in particular.

This time it begins with a smell.

Have you ever smelled fear? I don't mean anxiety or tension. I don't even mean dread. I certainly don't mean resignation, a smell too familiar to too many of us. I mean animal terror. That is what I smell.

I hear gunshots. Many of them. The same sort of gun I heard at the mouth of Latah Creek. I stand. Out of the corners of my eyes I see Allison look up at me. I shake my head, begin to walk. She stands, follows.

The smell gets stronger, mixing now with gunpowder, sweat, and the smell of horses. The sounds get stronger too: rifles, laughter, the whinnying of horses, and in my chest—not my ears—I hear the rumble of thousands of horse hooves pawing the ground.

I walk toward the sound, around a bend in the river, Allison a couple of steps behind me and off to the side.

And then I see before me a sea of horses, contained on one side by the river, on two sides by steep banks, and on the final side by a rope fence. They're the Indians' horses. Or they were. Men in blue surround the horses. Men in blue stand beyond the rope fence. Men in blue shout orders. Men in blue throw back their heads and laugh. Men in blue wade into the sea, clubbing the smaller horses and shooting the larger horses once in the head, just behind the ear. I look at one horse among the many hundreds, and I see the whites of her eyes as her child is killed, and then I see her fall, too. I hear another shot, and see another horse fall. And another. And another.

I stop, stand, stagger, say, “I can't. . . .”

The dust below turns to mud, mixing soil, blood, piss, and shit. The slaughter continues. The men in blue laugh and laugh and laugh.

Allison stands next to me, takes my hand.

“What,” I say, ‘is wrong with these people?”

I knew what I saw and I knew of course the larger cultural context in which what I'd seen took place—takes place—but I went to the library to learn the specifics. That first day I'd seen the end of what's called the Battle of the Spokane Plains, where in September, 1858, a combined force of Spokane, Palouse, Yakima, and Coeur d'Alene Indians attempted to drive a column of U.S. soldiers commanded by a Colonel George Wright from the Indians' land. It's a story we've heard tens of thousands of times, in tens of thousands of places at the frontiers of this culture. It's the story that the
wétikos
never seem to tire of realizing. It's the story of
wétikos
encountering a people who've lived on a land—with a land—for as long as that people can remember, who've become a part of that land as it has become a part of them. Or maybe that's not the story, since the non-
wétikos
do not exist, but are merely a barrier to the
wétikos
getting what they—we—want: a barrier to resource extraction, a barrier to the destruction of a piece of land, no different than thorns on a blackberry bush, no different than a snake who strikes at you before you cut off its head and sell its skin. It's the story of the
wétikos
, the civilized, those suffering from—or, from their perspective, blessed with—the cannibal sickness, those driven to conquer, to fulfill their manifest destiny. And it's the story of resistance by some members of the noninfected group, flight by others, the death of others, and the conversion or infection of still others.

In this case, as in so many, the Indians won a few battles, but the
wétikos
kept coming, wave after wave, until, finally, in the Battle of the Spokane Plains, the Indians were routed.

Soon, Indians came to speak with Colonel Wright, to tell him they wanted to fight no more. Colonel Wright responded, in words perfectly capturing the
wétiko
mentality of this entire culture, “I did not come into this country to ask you to make peace; I came here to fight. Now, when you are tired of the war, and ask for peace, I will tell you what you must do: You must come to me with your arms, and your women and children, and everything you have, and lay them at my feet; you must put your faith in me and trust to my mercy.” Sounds like God, doesn't it? Maybe that's because it is.

Wright held one of the chiefs who had come to speak with him as his prisoner, and a few days later hanged him at sunset.

Colonel Wright and his
wétiko
soldiers also captured—
stole
would be the less polite term—most of the Spokane Indians' horses. Of course, from the beginning of civilization the
wétikos
have instituted scorched earth policies everywhere they've gone—and I mean
scorched earth
in its most literal as well as figurative senses—systematically ruining all foods, fouling all waters, wrecking everything they cannot carry off to sell, enslave, or destroy elsewhere. Wright called a meeting of his officers to determine what to do with the horses. One officer later wrote, “I told him I should not sleep so long as they remained alive, as I regarded them the main dependence and most prized of all the possessions of the Indians.” Wright and the rest of the officers evidently agreed with this logic, because they allowed themselves and other favored officers to “select a certain number” of horses, and they gave one or two to each of the “friendly Indians”—in other words, those already infected—who had fought beside them. The other horses they ordered killed. The same officer who would not sleep so long as these horses lived later wrote, “They were all sleek, glossy, and fat, and as I love a horse, I fancied I saw in their beautiful faces an appeal for mercy. Towards the last the soldiers appeared to exult in their bloody task; such is the ferocious character of men.”

Or maybe such is the ferocious character of
wétikos
. The Indians had a different response. As I read in one book I found in the library, “Indians who heard of these latest developments now had very good reason to keep a great distance away from Wright. Entering Wright's camp clearly resulted in death.”

This is the story we have heard so many times: encountering the
wétikos
clearly results in death.

What are we going to do about the fact that civilization— the dominant culture, the cannibals, the
wétikos
, whatever— is killing the planet? I've written book after book describing this culture's destructiveness—and certainly I've read hundreds more—and I still don't understand it. I don't understand the motivations for the destruction—as we already talked about, what's the use of retiring rich on a planet being murdered, or more to the point, being rendered uninhabitable?—and I don't understand its wantonness. I don't understand the hatefulness on any level, from the most personal to the most global.

Today I learned that a friend of a friend was recently raped by an acquaintance of hers, in the presence of others of their social group. Although she actively tried to fight the man off, other members of this group later tried to convince her she had brought it on, and she had enjoyed it. She told them she was going to press charges, and every one of these people suddenly changed stories: far from her precipitating the rape, it never happened at all. One called her home and left a message threatening her with (more) physical harm if she pursued this case. The man's girlfriend has threatened her. Most of her friends are telling her not to ruin this man's life. Her bosses—a couple who live next door to the rapist's girlfriend—told her that if she pressed charges they would fire her.

I don't understand.

Salmon, bison, ivory-billed woodpeckers, Eskimo curlews, Carolina parakeets, Siberian tigers, Javan rhinos, swordfish, great white sharks, blue whales, gray whales, Steller's sea cows. Every stream in the continental United States is contaminated with carcinogens. There's dioxin and flame retardant in every mother's breast milk. There are more than 2 million dams just in the United States. It is entirely possible that global warming could enter a runaway phase that could effectively end life on this planet. We are told we must balance the “needs” of the economic system against the needs of “the environment.” And did I mention that deforestation of the Amazon is accelerating?

I don't understand.

The good news, I suppose, is that the point is not and has never been simply to understand the hatefulness, the destructiveness, as though describing it well enough, writing enough books about it, will somehow make the hatefulness go away and the destruction stop. The point is to stop the destructiveness, stop this malignant form of hatred. Ultimately our attempts at understanding the destructiveness are only helpful insofar as they help to stop that destructiveness. Otherwise they're a waste of time.

If the destructiveness is caused by some cultural sickness or by some hitchhiker, then the magical hope of many mainstream activists for some spiritual transformation leading to peace, justice, and sustainability becomes even more absurd than it already is. Sure, we've all heard of people facing death from some horrible disease who undergo a miraculous spiritual rebirth that leads to remission of the disease and a long healthy life for the initiate, but we've also heard of those who undergo this rebirth and then die anyway. Sometimes diseases might be teachers for us, but sometimes cancer, Crohn's, diabetes, leprosy, AIDS, tuberculosis, Ebola, smallpox, and polio aren't teachers so much as they're simply diseases that kill us. Similarly, how many psychopaths have suddenly become warm and loving individuals? I know that the recidivism rate among perpetrators of domestic violence approaches 100 percent. To be clear: could words stop a rabid dog? Could waves of loving kindness stop an infected cricket from reaching water? Could impassioned pleas and precise articulations stop a spider from spinning her own scaffold for the wasp who will soon kill her? Will entreaties and moral pronouncements stop the wétikos from turning this entire planet into a death camp—which of course from the perspective of the indigenous and of nonhumans they already have—and even worse, from killing the whole planet? worse, from killing the whole planet?

These are questions with answers I understand.

Yet another day, yet another picnic. You'd think I'd have learned. This day we're going to visit some of the apple trees we planted. Planting trees for bears hasn't worked like we'd hoped. The damn bears keep snapping off limbs, sometimes trunks. Don't they realize we're planting these trees for them?