We are living at an important and fruitful moment, now, for it is clear to men that the images of adult manhood given by the popular culture are worn out; a man can no longer depend on them. By the time a man is thirty-five he knows that the images of the right man, the tough man, the true man he received in high school do not work in life. Such a man is open to new visions of what a man is supposed to be.
—Robert Bly, 1990
THERE ARE FEW THINGS IN THIS WORLD I CAN CONCEIVE AS BEING MORE INSTANTLY ludicrous than a prosperously middle-aged lump of pudgy Euroamerican versemonger, an apparition looking uncannily like some weird cross between the Malt-O-Milk Marshmallow Man and Pillsbury's Doughboy, suited up in a grotesque mismatch combining pleated Scottish tweeds with a striped Brooks Brothers shirt and Southwest Indian print vest, peering myopically along his nose through coke-bottle steel-rim specs while holding forth in stilted and somewhat nasal tonalities on the essential virtues of virility, of masculinity, of being or becoming a “warrior.” The intrinsic absurdity of such a scene is, moreover, compounded by a factor of five when it is witnessed by an audience— all male, virtually all white, and on the whole obviously well accustomed to enjoying a certain pleasant standard of material comfort—which sits as if spellbound, rapt in its attention to every nuance of the speaker, altogether fawning in its collective nods and murmurs of devout agreement with each detail of his discourse.
At first glance, the image might seem to be the most vicious sort of parody, a satire offered in the worst of taste, perhaps an hallucinatory fragment of a cartoon or skit offered by the likes of National Lampoon or Saturday Night Live. Certainly, in a reasonable universe we would be entitled (perhaps required) to assume that no group of allegedly functional adults would take such a farce seriously, never mind line up to pay money for the privilege of participating in it. Yet, as we know, or should by now, the universe we are forced to inhabit has been transformed long since—notably by the very group so prominent in its representation among those constituting our warrior/mystic/ wordsmith's assemblage—into something in which reasonable behavior and comportment play only the smallest of parts. And so the whole travesty is advanced with the utmost seriousness, at least by its proponents and a growing body of adherents who subsidize and otherwise support them.
The founder and reigning Grand Pooh-Bah of that variant of the “New Age” usually referred to as the “Men's Movement” is Robert Bly, a rather owlish butterball of a minor poet who seems to have set out at fifty-something to finally garner unto himself some smidgin of the macho self-esteem his physique and life of letters had conspired to deny him up to that point.1 Writerly even in this pursuit, however, Bly has contented himself mainly with devising a vague theory of “masculinism” designed or at least intended to counter prevailing feminist dogma concerning “The Patriarchy,” rising interest in “multicultural” interpretations of how things work, and an accompanying sense among middle-to upper-middle-class males that they are “losing influence” in contemporary society.2
A strange brew consisting of roughly equal parts Arthurian, Norse, and Celtic legend, occasional adaptations of fairy tales by the brothers Grimm, a scattering of his own and assorted dead white males’ verse and prose, a dash of environmentalism, and, for spice, bits and pieces of Judaic, Islamic, East Asian, and American Indian spiritualism, Bly's message of “male liberation” has been delivered via an unending series of increasingly well-paid podium performances beginning in the mid-80s. Presented in a manner falling somewhere between mystic parable and pop psychology, Bly's lectures are frequently tedious, often pedantic, pathetically pretentious in both content and elocution. Still, they find a powerful emotional resonance among those attracted to the central themes announced in his interviews and advertising circulars, especially when his verbiage focuses upon the ideas of “reclaiming the primitive within us… attaining freedom through use of appropriate ritual…[and] the rights of all men to transcend cultural boundaries in redeeming their warrior souls.”3
By 1990, the master had perfected his pitch to the point of committing it to print in a turgid but rapidly-selling tome entitled Iron John.4 He had also established something like a franchise system, training cadres in various localities to provide “male empowerment rituals” for a fee (a “Wild Man Weekend” goes at $250 a pop; individual ceremonies are usually pro-rated).
Meanwhile, the rising popularity and consequent profit potential of Bly's endeavor had spawned a number of imitators—Patrick M.Arnold, Asa Baber, Tom Daly, Robert Moore, Douglas Gillette, R.J.Stewart, Kenneth Wetcher, Art Barker, F.W. McCaughtry, John Matthews, and Christopher Harding among them—literary and otherwise.5 Three years later, the Men's Movement had become pervasive enough to be viewed as a tangible and growing social force rather than merely as a peculiar fringe group; active chapters are listed in 43 of the 50 major U.S. cities (plus four in Canada) in the movement's “selected” address list; 25 periodicals are listed in the same directory.6
The ability of a male to shout and be fierce does not imply domination, treating people as if they were objects, demanding land or empire, holding on to the Cold War—the whole model of machismo… The Wild Man here amounts to an invisible presence, the companionship of the ancestors and the great artists among the dead… The native Americans believe in that healthful male power.
—Robert Bly, 1990
At first glance, none of this may seem particularly threatening. Indeed, the sheer silliness inherent to Bly's routine at many levels is painfully obvious, a matter driven home to me one spring morning when, out looking for some early sage, I came upon a group of young Euroamerican males cavorting stark naked in a meadow near Lyons, Colorado. Several had wildflowers braided into their hair. Some were attempting a chant I failed to recognize. I noticed an early growth of poison oak near where I was standing, but determined it was probably best not to disrupt whatever rite was being conducted with anything so mundane as a warning about the presence of discomforting types of plant life. As discreetly as possible, I turned around and headed the other way, both puzzled and somewhat amused by what I’d witnessed.
A few days later, I encountered one of the participants, whom I knew slightly, and who kept scratching at his left thigh. Seizing the opportunity, I inquired what it was they’d been doing. He responded that since he and the others had attended a workshop conducted by Robert Bly earlier in the year, they’d become active in the Men's Movement and “made a commitment to recover the Druidic rituals which are part of our heritage” (the man, an anthropology student at the University of Colorado, is of Slavic descent, making Druidism about as distant from his own cultural tradition as Sufism or Zen Buddhism). Interest piqued, I asked where they’d learned the ritual form involved and its meaning. He replied that, while they’d attempted to research the matter, “it turns out there's not really a lot known about exactly how the Druids conducted their rituals.” “It's mostly guesswork,” he went on. “We’re just kind of making it up as we go along.” When I asked why, if that were the case, they described their ritual as being Druidic, he shrugged. “It just sort of feels good, I guess,” he said. “We’re trying to get in touch with something primal in ourselves.”
Harmless? Maybe. But then again, maybe not. The Druids, after all, have reputedly been dead and gone for centuries. They are thus immune to whatever culturally destructive effects might attend such blatant appropriation, trivialization, and deformation of their sacred rites by non-Druidic feel-gooders. Before departing the meadow, however, I’d noticed that a couple of the men gamboling about in the grass were adorned with facepaint and feathers. So I queried my respondent as to whether in the view of his group such things comprised a part of Druid ritual life. “Well, no,” he confessed. “A couple of the guys are really into American Indian stuff. Actually, we all are. Wallace Black Elk is our teacher.7 We run sweats on the weekends, and most of us have been on the hill [insider slang for the undertaking of a Vision Quest]. I myself carry a Sacred Pipe and am studying herbal healing, Lakota Way. Three of us went to the Sun Dance at Crow Dog's place last summer. We’ve made vows, and are planning to dance when we’re ready.”8 Intermingled with these remarks, he extended glowing bits of commentary on his and the others’ abiding interest in a diversity of cultural/spiritual elements ranging from Balinese mask-making to Andean flute music, from Japanese scent/time orientation to the deities of the Assyrians, Polynesian water gods, and the clitoral circumcision of Somali women.
I thought about protesting that spiritual traditions cannot be used as some sort of Whitman's Sampler of ceremonial form, mixed and matched—here a little Druid, there a touch of Nordic mythology, followed by a regimen of Hindu vegetarianism, a mishmash of American Indian rituals somewhere else—at the whim of people who are part of none of them. I knew I should say that to play at ritual potluck is to debase all spiritual traditions, voiding their internal coherence and leaving nothing usably sacrosanct as a cultural anchor for the peoples who conceived and developed them, and who have consequently organized their societies around them. But, then, in consideration of who it was I was talking to, I abruptly ended the conversation instead. I doubted he would have understood what I was trying to explain to him. More important, I had the distinct impression he wouldn’t have cared even if he had. Such observations on my part would most likely have only set loose “the warrior in him,” a flow of logorrhea in which he asserted his and his peers’ “inalienable right” to take anything they found of value in the intellectual property of others, converting it to whatever use suited their purposes at the moment. I was a bit tired, having just come from a meeting with a white environmental group where I’d attempted unsuccessfully to explain how support of native land rights might bear some positive relationship to their announced ecological concerns, and felt it just wasn’t my night to deal with the ghost of Christopher Columbus for a second time, head on.
That's an excuse, to be sure. Probably, I failed in my duty. Perhaps, regardless of the odds against success, I should have tried reasoning with him. More likely, I should’ve done what my ancestors should have done to Columbus himself when the “Great Discoverer” first brought his embryo of the Men's Movement to this hemisphere. But the amount of prison time assigned these days to that sort of response to aggression is daunting, to say the least. And I really do lack the wallspace to properly display his tanned hide after skinning him alive. So I did nothing more than walk out of the coffee shop in which we’d been seated, leaving him to wonder what it was that had upset me. Not that he's likely to have gotten the message. The result of my inaction is that, so far as I know, the man is still out there cruising the cerebral seas in search of “spiritual landscapes” to explore and pillage. Worse, he's still sending his booty back to his buddies in hopes of their casting some “new synthesis of paganism”—read, “advancement of civilization as we know it”—in which they will be able to continue their occupancy of a presumed position at the center of the universe.
We must get out of ourselves, or, more accurately, the selves we have been conned into believing are “us.” We must break out of the cage of artificial “self” in which we have been entrapped as “men” by today's society. We must get in touch with our true selves, recapturing the Wild Man, the animal, the primitive warrior being which exists in the core of every man. We must rediscover the meaning of maleness, the art of being male, the way of the warrior priest. In doing so, we free ourselves from the alienating tyranny of being what it is we’re told we are, or what it is we should be. We free ourselves to redefine the meaning of “man,” to be who and what we can be, and what it is we ultimately must be. I speak here, of course, of genuine liberation from society's false expectations and thus from the false selves these expectations have instilled in each and every one of us here in this room. Let the Wild Man loose, I say! Free our warrior spirit!
—Robert Bly, 1991
In retrospect, it seems entirely predictable that, amidst Robert Bly's welter of babble concerning the value of assorted strains of imagined primitivism and warrior spirit, a substantial segment of his following—and he himself in the workshops he offers on “practical ritual”—would end up gravitating most heavily toward things Indian. After all, Native Americans and our ceremonial life constitute living, ongoing entities. We are therefore far more accessible in terms of both time and space than the Druids or the old Norse Odinists. Further, our traditions offer the distinct advantage of seeming satisfyingly exotic to the average Euroamerican yuppie male, while not forcing them to clank about in the suits of chain mail and heavy steel armor which would be required if they they were to opt to act out their leader's hyperliterate Arthurian fantasies. I mean, really…Jousting, anyone? A warrior-type fella could get seriously hurt that way.9
A main sticking point, of course, rests precisely in the fact that the cultures indigenous to America are living, ongoing entities. Unlike the Druids or the ancient Greek man-cults who celebrated Hector and Achilles, Native American societies can and do suffer the socioculturally debilitating effects of spiritual trivialization and appropriation at the hands of the massively larger Euro-immigrant population which has come to to dominate literally every other aspect of our existence. As Margo Thunderbird, an activist of the Shinnecock Nation, has put it, “They came for our land, for what grew or could be grown on it, for the resources in it, and for our our clean air and pure water. They stole these things from us, and in the taking they also stole our free ways and the best of our leaders, killed in battle or assassinated. And now, after all that, they’ve come for the very last of our possessions; now they want our pride, our history, our spiritual traditions. They want to rewrite and remake these things, to claim them for themselves. The lies and thefts just never end.”10 Or, as the Oneida scholar Pam Colorado frames the matter:
The process is ultimately intended to supplant Indians, even in areas of their own culture and spirituality. In the end, non-Indians will have complete power to define what is and what is not Indian, even for Indians. We are talking here about a complete ideological/conceptual subordination of Indian people in addition to the total physical subordination they already experience. When this happens, the last vestiges of real Indian society and Indian rights will disappear. Non-Indians will then claim to “own” our heritage and ideas as thoroughly as they now claim to own our land and resources.11
From this perspective, the American Indian Movement passed a resolution at its 1984 Southwest Leadership Conference condemning the laissez-faire use of native ceremonies and/or ceremonial objects by anyone not sanctioned by traditional indigenous spiritual leaders.12 The AIM position also echoed an earlier resolution taken by the Traditional Elders Circle in 1980, condemning even Indians who engage in “use of [our] spiritual ceremonies with non-Indian people for profit.”13 Another such condemnation had been issued during the First American Indian Tribunal at D-Q University in 1982.14 In June 1993, the Lakota Nation enacted a similar resolution denouncing non-Lakotas who presume to “adopt” their rituals, and censoring those Lakotas who have chosen to facilitate such cultural appropriation.15 Several other indigenous nations and national organizations have already taken comparable positions, or are preparing to.16
This may seem an exaggerated and overly harsh response to what the Spokane/Coeur d’Alene writer Sherman Alexie has laughingly dismissed as being little more than a “Society for Confused White Men.”17 But the hard edges of Euroamerican hubris and assertion of proprietary interest in native assets which has always marked Indian/white relations are abundantly manifested in the organizational literature of the Men's Movement itself. Of even greater concern is the fact that the sort of appropriation evidenced in these periodicals is no longer restricted simply to claiming “ownership” of Indian ceremonies and spiritual objects, as in a passage in a recent issue of the Men's Council Journal explaining that “sweats, drumming, dancing, [and] four direction-calling [are] once-indigenous now-ours rituals.”18 Rather, participants have increasingly assumed a stance of expropriating native identity altogether, as when, in the same journal, it is repeatedly asserted that “we…are all Lakota” and that members of the Men's Movement are now displacing actual Lakotas from their “previous” role as “warrior protectors” (of what, is left unclear).19
The indigenous response to such presumption was perhaps best expressed by AIM leader Russell Means, himself an Oglala Lakota, when he stated that, “This is the ultimate degradation of our people, even worse than what's been done to us by Hollywood and the publishing industry, or the sports teams who portray us as mascots and pets. What these people are doing is like Adolf Eichmann claiming during his trial that, at heart, he was really a zionist, or members of the Aryan Nations in Idaho claiming to be ‘True Jews’.”20 Elsewhere, Means has observed that:
What's at issue here is the same old question that Europeans have always posed with regard to American Indians, whether what's ours isn’t somehow theirs. And, of course, they’ve always answered the question in the affirmative… We are resisting this because spirituality is the basis of our culture. If our culture is dissolved [via the expedients of spiritual appropriation/expropriation], Indian people as such will cease to exist. By definition, the causing of any culture to cease to exist is an act of genocide.21
Noted author Vine Deloria, Jr., agrees in principle, finding that as a result of the presumption of groups like the Men's Movement, as well as academic anthropology, “the realities of Indian belief and existence have become so misunderstood and distorted at this point that when a real Indian stands up and speaks the truth at any given moment, he or she is is not only unlikely to be believed, but will probably be publicly contradicted and ‘corrected’ by the citation of some non-Indian and totally inaccurate expert’.”22
Moreover, young Indians in [cities and] universities are now being trained to view themselves and their cultures in the terms prescribed by such experts rather than in the traditional terms of the tribal elders. The process automatically sets the members of Indian communities at odds with one another, while outsiders run around picking up the pieces for themselves. In this way [groups like the Men's Movement] are perfecting a system of self-validation in which all semblance of honesty and accuracy are lost. This is…absolutely devastating to Indian societies.23
Even Sherman Alexie, while choosing to treat the Men's Movement phenomenon with scorn and ridicule rather than open hostility, is compelled to acknowledge that there is a serious problem with the direction taken by Bly's disciples. “Peyote is not just an excuse to get high,” Alexie points out. “A Vision Quest cannot be completed in a convention room rented for that purpose… [T]he sweat lodge is a church, not a free clinic or something… A warrior does not have to scream to release the animal that is supposed to reside inside every man. A warrior does not necessarily have an animal inside him at all. If there happens to be an animal, it can be a parakeet or a mouse just as easily as it can be a bear or a wolf. When a white man adopts an animal, he [seems inevitably to choose] the largest animal possible. Whether this is because of possible phallic connotations or a kind of spiritual steroid abuse is debatable, [but] I can imagine a friend of mine, John, who is white, telling me that his spirit animal is the Tyrannosaurus Rex.”24
The men's movement seems designed to appropriate and mutate so many aspects of native traditions. I worry about the possibilities: men's movement chain stores specializing in portable sweat lodges; the “Indians ‘R’ Us” com modification of ritual and artifact; white men who continue to show up at powwows in full regalia and dance.25
Plainly, despite sharp differences in their respective temperaments and resultant stylistic approaches to dealing with problems, Alexie and many other Indians share Russell Means’ overall conclusion that the “culture vultures” of the Men's Movement are “not innocent or innocuous…cute, groovy, hip, enlightened or any of the rest of the things they want to project themselves as being. No, what they’re about is cultural genocide. And genocide is genocide, no matter how you want to ‘qualify’ it. So some of us are starting to react to these folks accordingly.”26
Western man's connection to the Wild Man has been disturbed for centuries now, and a lot of fear has been built up [but] Wild Man is part of a company or a community in a man's psyche. The Wild Man lives in complicated interchanges with other interior beings. A whole community of beings is what is called a grown man… Moreover, when we develop the inner Wild Man, he keeps track of the wild animals inside us, and warns when they are liable to become extinct. The Wild One in you is the one which is willing to leave the busy life, and able to be called away.
—Robert Bly, 1990
In many ways, the salient questions which present themselves with regard to the Men's Movement center on motivation. Why, in this day and age, would any group of well-educated and self-proclaimedly sensitive men, the vast majority of whom may be expected to exhibit genuine outrage at my earlier comparison of them to Columbus, elect to engage in activities which can plausibly be categorized as culturally genocidal? Assuming initial ignorance in this regard, why do they choose to persist in these activities, often escalating their behavior after its implications have been explained by its victims repeatedly and in no uncertain terms? And, perhaps most of all, why would such extraordinarily privileged individuals as those who’ve flocked to Robert Bly—a group marked by nothing so much as the kind of ego-driven self-absorption required to insist upon its “right” to impose itself on a tiny minority even to the point of culturally exterminating it—opt to do so in a manner which makes them appear not only repugnant, but utterly ridiculous to anyone outside their ranks?
Sometimes it is necessary to step away from a given setting in order to better understand it. For me, the answers to these seemingly inexplicable questions were to a large extent clarified during a political speaking tour of Germany, during which I was repeatedly confronted by the spectacle of Indian “hobbyists,” all of them men resplendently attired in quillwork and bangles, beaded moccasins, chokers, amulets, medicine bags, and so on.27 Some of them sported feathers and buckskin shirts or jackets; a few wore their blond hair braided with rawhide in what they imagined to be high plains style (in reality, they looked much more like Vikings than Cheyennes or Shoshones). When queried, many professed to have handcrafted much of their own regalia.28 A number also made mention of having fashioned their own pipestone pipes, or to have been presented with one, usually after making a hefty monetary contribution, by one of a gaggle of Indian or pretended-Indian hucksters.29
Among those falling into this classification, belonging to what Christian Feest has branded the “Faculty of Medicine” plying a lucrative “Greater Europa Medicine Man Circuit,”30 are Wallace Black Elk, “Brooke Medicine Eagle” (a bogus Cherokee; real name unknown), “John Redtail Freesoul” (a purported Cheyenne-Arapaho; real name unknown), Archie Fire Lamedeer (Northern Cheyenne), “Dhyani Ywahoo” (supposedly a 27th generation member of the nonexistent “Etowah” band of the Eastern Cherokees; real name unknown), “Eagle Walking Turtle” (Gary McClain, an alleged Choctaw), “Eagle Man” (Ed McGaa, Oglala Lakota), “Beautiful Painted Arrow” (a supposed Shoshone; real name unknown).31 Although the success of such people “is completely independent of traditional knowledge, just so long as they can impress a public impressed by the books of Carlos Castaneda,”32 most of the hobbyists I talked to noted they’d “received instruction” from one or more of these “Indian spiritual teachers” and had now adopted various deformed fragments of Native American ritual life as being both authentic and their own.
Everyone felt they had been “trained” to run sweats. Most had been provided similar tutelage in conducting Medicine Wheel Ceremonies and Vision Quests. Several were pursuing what they thought were Navajo crystal-healing techniques, and/or herbal healing (where they figured to gather herbs not native to their habitat was left unaddressed). Two mentioned they’d participated in a “sun dance” conducted several years ago in the Black Forest by an unspecified “Lakota medicine man” (they displayed chest scars verifying that they had indeed done something of the sort), and said they were now considering launching their own version on an annual basis. Half a dozen more inquired as to whether I could provide them entree to the Sun Dances conducted each summer on stateside reservations (of special interest are those of the “Sioux”).33 One poor soul, a Swiss national as it turned out, proudly observed that he’d somehow managed to survive living in an Alpine tipi for the past several years.34 All of them maintained that they actually considered themselves to be Indians, at least “in spirit.”35
These “Indians of Europe,” as Feest has termed them, were uniformly quite candid as to why they felt this way.36 Bluntly put—and the majority were precisely this harsh in their own articulations—they absolutely hated the idea of being Europeans, especially Germans. Abundant mention was made of their collective revulsion to the European heritage of colonization and genocide, particularly the ravages of nazism. Some went deeper, addressing what they felt to be the intrinsically unacceptable character of European civilization's relationship to the natural order in its entirety. Their response, as a group, was to try and disassociate themselves from what it was/is they object to by announcing their personal identities in terms as diametrically opposed to it as they could conceive. “Becoming” American Indians in their own minds apparently fulfilled this deep-seated need in a most gratifying fashion.37
Yet, when I delved deeper, virtually all of them ultimately admitted they were little more than weekend warriors, or “cultural transvestites,” to borrow another of Feest's descriptors.38 They typically engaged in their Indianist preoccupations only during their off hours while maintaining regular jobs—mainly quite responsible and well-paying positions, at that—squarely within the very system of Germanic business-as-usual they claimed so heatedly to have disavowed, root and branch. The most candid respondents were even willing to admit, when pushed, that were it not for the income accruing from their daily roles as “Good Germans,” they’d not be able to afford their hobby of imagining themselves to be something else…or to pay the fees charged by imported Native American “spirit leaders” to validate this impression. Further, without exception, when I inquired as to what they might be doing to challenge and transform the fundamental nature of the German culture, society, and state they professed to detest so deeply, they observed that they had become “spiritual people” and therefore “apolitical.” Queries concerning whether they might be willing to engage in activities to physically defend the rights and territories of indigenous peoples in North America drew much the same reply.
The upshot of German hobbyism, then, is that, far from constituting the sort of radical divorce from Germanic context its adherents assert, part-time impersonation of American Indians represents a means through which they can psychologically reconcile themselves to it. By pretending to be what they are not—and in fact can never be, because the objects of their fantasies have never existed in real life—the hobbyists are freed to be what they are (but deny), and to “feel good about themselves” in the process.39 And, since this sophistry allows them to contend in all apparent seriousness that they are somehow entirely separate from the oppressive status quo upon which they depend, and which their “real world” occupations do so much to make possible, they thereby absolve themselves of any obligation whatsoever to materially confront it (and thence themselves). Voilà! “Wildmen” and “primitives” carrying out the most refined functions of the German corporate state; “warriors” relieved of the necessity of doing battle other than in the most metaphorical of senses, and then always (and only) in service to the very structures and traditions they claim—and may even have convinced themselves to believe at some level or another—their perverse posturing negates.40
Contemporary business life allows competitive relationships only, in which the major emotions are anxiety, tension, loneliness, rivalry, and fear…Zeus energy has been steadily disintegrating decade after decade in the United States. Popular culture has been determined to destroy respect for it, beginning with the “Maggie and Jiggs” and “Dagwood and Blondie” comics of the 1920s and 1930s, in which the man is always weak and foolish… The recovery of some form of [powerful rituals of male] initiation is essential to the culture. The United States has undergone an unmistakable decline since 1950, and I believe if we do not find [these kinds of male ritual] the decline will continue.
—Robert Bly, 1990
Obviously, the liberatory potential of all this for actual American Indians is considerably less than zero. Instead, hobbyism is a decidedly parasitical enterprise, devoted exclusively to the emotional edification of individuals integrally and instrumentally involved in perpetuating and perfecting the system of global domination from which the genocidal colonization of Native America stemmed and by which it is continued. Equally, there is a strikingly close, if somewhat antecedent, correspondence between German hobbyism on the one hand, and the North American Men's Movement on the other. The class and ethnic compositions are virtually identical, as are the resulting social functions, internal dynamics, and external impacts.41 So close is the match, not only demographically, but motivationally and behaviorally, that Robert Bly himself scheduled a tour of Germany during the summer of 1993 to bring the Old World's Teutonic sector into his burgeoning fold.42
Perhaps the only significant difference between the Men's Movement at home and hobbyism abroad is just that: the hobbyists at least are “over there,” but the Men's Movement is right here, where we live. Hobbyism in Germany may contribute to what both Adolf Hitler and George Bush called the “New World Order,” and thus yield a negative but somewhat indirect effect upon native people in North America, but the Men's Movement is quite directly connected to the ever more efficient imposition of that order upon Indian lands and lives in the U.S. and Canada. The mining engineer who joins the Men's Movement and thereafter spends his weekends “communing with nature in the manner of an Indian” does so—in precisely the same fashion as his German colleagues—in order to exempt himself from either literal or emotional responsibility for the fact that, to be who he is and live at the standard he does, he will spend the rest of his week making wholesale destruction of the environment an operant reality. Not infrequently, the land being stripmined under his supervision belongs to the very Indians whose spiritual traditions he appropriates and reifies in the process of “finding inner peace” (i.e., empowering himself to do what he does).43
By the same token, the corporate lawyer, the Wall Street broker and the commercial banker who accompany the engineer into a sweat lodge do so because, intellectually, they understand quite well that, without them, his vocation would be impossible. The same can be said for the government bureaucrat, the corporate executive, and the marketing consultant who keep Sacred Pipes on the walls of their respective offices. All of them are engaged, to a greater or lesser degree—although, if asked, most will adamantly reject the slightest hint that they are involved at all—in the systematic destruction of the residue of territory upon which prospects of native life itself are balanced. The charade by which they cloak themselves in the identity of their victims is their best and ultimately most compulsive hedge against the psychic consequences of acknowledging who and what they really are.44
Self-evidently, then, New Age-style rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding, this pattern of emotional/psychological avoidance embedded in the ritual role-playing of Indians by a relatively privileged stratum of Euroamerican men represents no alternative to the status quo. To the contrary, it has become a steadily more crucial ingredient in an emergent complex of psychosocial mechanisms allowing North American business-as-usual to sustain, stabilize, and reenergize itself. Put another way, had the Men's Movement not come into being complements of Robert Bly and his clones, it would have been necessary—just as the nazis found it useful to do so in their day—for North America's governmental-corporate élite to have created it on their own.45 On second thought, it's not altogether clear they didn’t.46
The ancient societies believed that a boy becomes a man only through ritual and effort—only through the “active intervention of the older men.” It's becoming clear to us that manhood doesn’t happen by itself; it doesn’t just happen because we eat Wheaties. The active intervention of the older men means the older men welcome the younger man into the ancient, mythologized, instinctive male world.
—Robert Bly, 1990
With all this said, it still must be admitted that there is a scent of undeniably real human desperation—an all but obsessive desire to find some avenue of alternative cultural expression different from that sketched above—clinging to the Men's Movement and its New Age and hobbyist equivalents. The palpable anguish this entails allows for, or requires, a somewhat more sympathetic construction of the motives prodding a segment of the movements membership, and an illative obligation on the part of anyone not themselves experiencing it to respond in a firm, but helpful rather than antagonistic manner.
Perhaps more accurately, it should be said that the sense of despair at issue evidences itself not so much in the ranks of the Men's Movement and related phenomena themselves, but within the milieu from which these manifestations have arisen: white, mostly urban, affluent or affluently reared, well-schooled, young (or youngish) people of both genders who, in one or another dimension, are thoroughly dis-eased by the socioeconomic order into which they were born and their seemingly predestined roles within it.47 Many of them openly seek, some through serious attempts at political resistance, a viable option with which they may not only alter their own individual fates, but transform the overall systemic realities they correctly perceive as having generated these fates in the first place.48 As a whole, they seem sincerely baffled by the prospect of having to define for themselves the central aspect of this alternative.
They cannot put a name to it, and so they perpetually spin their wheels, waging continuous theoretical and sometimes practical battles against each “hierarchical” and “patriarchal” fragment of the whole they oppose: capitalism and fascism, colonialism, neocolonialism and imperialism, racism and sexism, ageism, consumerism, the entire vast plethora of “isms” and “ologies” making up the “modern” (or “postmodern”) society they inhabit.49 Frustrated and stymied in their efforts to come up with a new or different conceptualization by which to guide their oppositional project, many of the most alienated —and therefore most committed to achieving fundamental social change—eventually opt for the intellectual/emotional reassurance of prepackaged “radical solutions.” Typically, these assume the form of yet another battery of “isms” based in all the same core assumptions as the system being opposed. This is especially true of that galaxy of doctrinal tendencies falling within the general rubric of “marxism”—Bernsteinian revisionism, council communism, marxism-leninism, stalinism, maoism, etc.—but it is also an actuality pervading most variants of feminism, environmentalism, and anarchism/anti-authoritarianism as well.50
Others, burned out by an endless diet of increasingly sterile polemical chatter and symbolic political action, defect from the resistance altogether, deforming what German New Left theorist Rudi Dutschke51 once advocated as “a long march through the institutions” into an outright embrace of the false and reactionary “security” found in statism and bureaucratic corporatism (a tendency exemplified in the U.S. by such 1960s radical figures as Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin, Eldridge Cleaver, David Horowitz, and Rennie Davis).52 A mainstay occupation of this coterie has been academia, wherein they typically maintain an increasingly irrelevant and detached “critical” discourse, calculated mainly to negate whatever transformative value or utility might be lodged in the concrete oppositional political engagement they formerly pursued.53
Some members of each group—formula radicals and sellouts—end up glossing over the psychic void left by their default in arriving at a genuinely alternative vision, immersing themselves either in some formalized religion (Catholicism, for example, or, somewhat less frequently, denominations of Islam or Buddhism), or the polyglot “spiritualism” offered by the New Age/Men's Movement/Hobbyism syndrome.54 This futile cycle is now in its third successive generation of repetition among European and Euroamerican activists since the so-called “new student movement” was born only thirty years ago. At one level or another, almost all of those currently involved, and quite a large proportion of those who once were, are figuratively screaming for a workable means of breaking the cycle, some way of foundationing themselves for a sustained and successful effort to effect societal change rather than the series of dead ends they’ve encountered up till now. Yet a functional alternative exists, and has always existed.
This was brought home to me most dramatically during my earlier-mentioned speaking tour of Germany.55 The question most frequently asked by those who turned out to hear me speak on the struggle for liberation in Native North America was, “What can we do to help?” Quite uniformly, the answer I provided to this query was that, strategically, the most important assistance the people in the audience could render American Indians would be to win their own struggle for liberation in Germany. In effect, I reiterated time after time, this would eliminate the German corporate state as a linchpin of the global politicoeconomic order in which the United States (along with its Canadian satellite) serves as the hub.
“You must understand,” I stated each time the question arose, “that I really mean it when I say we are all related. Consequently, I see the mechanisms of our oppression as being equally interrelated. Given this perspective, I cannot help but see a victory for you as being simultaneously a victory for American Indians, and vice versa; that a weakening of your enemy here in Germany necessarily weakens ours there, in North America; that your liberation is inseparably linked to our own, and that you should see ours as advancing yours. Perhaps, then, the question should be reversed: what is it that we can best do to help you succeed?”
As an expression of solidarity, these sentiments were on every occasion roundly applauded. Invariably, however, they also produced a set of rejoinders intended to qualify the implications of what I’d said to the point of negation. The usual drift of these responses was that the German and American Indian situations and resulting struggles are entirely different, and thus not to be compared in the manner I’d attempted. This is true, those making this point argued, because Indians are colonized peoples while the Germans are colonizers. Indians, they went on, must therefore fight to free our occupied and underdeveloped landbase(s) while the German opposition, effectively landless, struggles to rearrange social and economic relations within an advanced industrial society. Most importantly, they concluded, native people in America hold the advantage of possessing cultures separate and distinct from that which we oppose, while the German opposition, by contrast, must contend with the circumstance of being essentially “cultureless” and disoriented.56
After every presentation, I was forced to take strong exception to such notions. “As longterm participants in the national liberation struggle of American Indians,” I said, “we have been forced into knowing the nature of colonialism very well. Along with you, we understand that the colonization we experience finds its origin in the matrix of European culture. But, apparently unlike you, we also understand that in order for Europe to do what it has done to us—in fact, for Europe to become ‘Europe’ at all—it first had to do the same thing to all of you. In other words, to become a colonizing culture, Europe had first to colonize itself.57 To the extent that this is true, I find it fair to say that if our struggle must be explicitly anticolonial in its form, content and aspirations, yours must be even more so. You have, after all, been colonized far longer than we, and therefore much more completely. In fact, your colonization has by now been consolidated to such an extent that—with certain notable exceptions, like the Irish and Euskadi (Basque) nationalists—you no longer even see yourselves as having been colonized.58 The result is that you’ve become self-colonizing, conditioned to be so self-identified with your own oppression that you’ve lost your ability to see it for what it is, much less to resist it in any coherent way.
“You seem to feel that you are either completely disconnected from your own heritage of having been conquered and colonized, or that you can and should disconnect yourselves from it as a means of destroying that which oppresses you. I believe, on the other hand, that your internalization of this self-hating outlook is exactly what your oppressors want most to see you do. Such a posture on your part simply perfects and completes the structure of your domination. It is inherently self-defeating because in denying yourselves the meaning of your own history and traditions, you leave yourselves with neither an established point of departure from which to launch your own struggle for liberation, nor any set of goals and objectives to guide that struggle other than abstractions. You are thereby left effectively anchorless and rudderless, adrift on a stormy sea. You have lost your maps and compass, so you have no idea where you are or where to turn for help. Worst of all, you sense that the ship on which you find yourselves trapped is rapidly sinking. I can imagine no more terrifying situation to be in, and, as relatives, we would like to throw you a life preserver.
“So here it is,” I went on. “It takes the form of an insight offered by our elders: To understand where you are are, you must know where you’ve been, and you must know where you are to understand where you are going.’59 For Indians, you see, the past, present and future are all equally important parts of the same indivisible whole. And I believe this is as true for you as it is for us. In other words, you must set yourselves to reclaiming your own indigenous past. You must come to know it in its own terms—the terms of its internal values and understandings, and the way these were applied to living in this world—not the terms imposed upon it by the order which set out to destroy it. You must learn to put your knowledge of this heritage to use as a lens through which you can clarify your present circumstance, to ‘know where you are,’ so to speak. And, from this, you can begin to chart the course of your struggle into the future. Put still another way, you, no less than we, must forge the conceptual tools that will allow you to carefully and consciously orient your struggle to regaining what it is that has been taken from you rather than presuming a unique ability to invent it all anew. You must begin with the decolonization of your own minds, with a restoration of your understanding of who you are, where you come from, what it is that has been done to you to take you to the place in which you now find yourselves. Then, and only then, it seems to us, will you be able to free yourselves from your present dilemma.
“Look at us, and really hear what we’re saying,” I demanded. “We are not unique in being indigenous people. Everyone is indigenous somewhere. You are indigenous here. You, no more than we, are landless; your land is occupied by an alien force, just like ours. You, just like us, have an overriding obligation to liberate your homeland. You, no less than we, have models in your own traditions upon which to base your alternatives to the social, political, and economic structures now imposed upon you. It is your responsibility to put yourselves in direct communication with these traditions, just as it is our responsibility to remain in contact with ours. We cannot fulfill this responsibility for you any more than you can fulfill ours for us.
“You say that the knowledge we speak of was taken from you too long ago, at the time of Charlemagne, more than a thousand years in the past. Because of this, you say, the gulf of time separating then from now is too great, that what was taken then is now lost and gone. We know better. We know, and so do you, that right up into the 1700s your ‘European’ colonizers were still busily burning ‘witches’ at the stake. We know, and you know too, that these women (and some men) were the leaders of your own indigenous cultures.60 The span of time separating you from a still-flourishing practice of your native ways is thus not so great as you would have us—and yourselves—believe. It's been 200 years, no more. And we also know that there are still those among your people who retain the knowledge of your past, knowledge handed down from one generation to the next, century after century. We can give you directions to some of them if you like, but we think you know they are there.61 You can begin to draw appropriate lessons and instruction from these faithkeepers, if you want to.
“Indians have said that ‘for the world to live, Europe must die.’62 We meant it when we said it, and we still do. But do not be confused. The statement was never intended to exclude you or consign you, as people, to oblivion.We believe the idea underlying that statement holds just as true for you as it does for anyone else. You do have a choice, because you are not who you’ve been convinced to believe you are. Or, at least not necessarily. You are not necessarily a part of the colonizing, predatory reality of’Europe.’ You are not even necessarily ‘Germans,’ with all that that implies. You are, or can be, who your ancestors were and who the faith-keepers of your cultures remain: Angles, Saxons, Huns, Goths, Visigoths. The choice is yours, but in order for it to have meaning you must meet the responsibilities which come with it.”
Such reasoning provoked considerable consternation among listeners. “But,” more than one exclaimed with unpretended horror, “think of who you’re speaking to! These are very dangerous ideas you are advocating. You are in Germany, among people raised to see themselves as Germans, and yet, at least in part, you are telling us we should do exactly what the nazis did! We Germans, at least those of us who are consciously antifascist and antiracist, renounce such excavations of our heritage precisely because of our country's own recent experiences with them. We know where Hitler's politics of ‘blood and soil’ led not just us but the world. We know the outcome of Himmler's reassertion of ‘Germanic paganism.’ Right now, we are being forced to confront a resurgence of nazism in this country. Surely you can’t be arguing that we should join in the resurrection of all that.”
“Of course not!” I retorted. “We, as American Indians, have at least as much reason to hate nazism as any people on earth. Not much of anything done by the nazis to people here had not already been done to us, for centuries, and some of the things the nazis did during their twelve years in power are still being done to us today. Much of what has been done to us in North America was done, and continues to be done, on the basis of philosophical rationalizations indistinguishable from those used by the nazis to justify their policies. If you want to look at it that way, you could say that antinazism is part of the absolute bedrock upon which our struggle is based. So, don’t even hint that any part of our perspective is somehow ‘pro-nazi.’
“I am aware that this is a highly emotional issue for you. But try and bear in mind that the world isn’t one-dimensional. Everything is multidimensional, possessed of positive as well as negative polarities. It should be obvious that the nazis didn’t repre sent or crystallize your indigenous traditions. Instead, they perverted your heritage for their own purposes, using your ancestral traditions against themselves in a fashion meant to supplant and destroy them. The European predator has always done this, whenever it was not simply trying to suppress the indigenous host upon which it feeds. Perhaps the nazis were the most overt, and in some ways the most successful, in doing this in recent times. And for that reason some of us view them as being a sort of culmination of all that is European. But, the point is, they very deliberately tapped the negative rather than the positive potential of what we are discussing.
“Now, polarities aside,” I continued, “the magnitude of favorable response accorded by the mass of Germans to the themes taken up by the nazis during the 1930s illustrates perfectly the importance of the question we are raising.63 There is unquestionably a tremendous yearning among all peoples, including your own—and you yourselves, for that matter—for a sense of connectedness to their roots. This yearning, although often sublimated, translates quite readily into transformative power whenever (and however) it is effectively addressed.64 Hence, part of what we are arguing is that you must consciously establish the positive polarity of your heritage as a counter to the negative impulse created by the nazis. If you don’t, it's likely we’re going to witness German officials walking around in black death's head uniforms all over again. The signs are there, you must admit.65 And you must also admit there's a certain logic involved, since you yourselves seem bent upon abandoning the power of your indigenous traditions to nazism. Suffice it to say we’d not give our traditions over to the uncontested use of nazis. Maybe you shouldn’t either.”
Such remarks usually engendered commentary about how the audience had “never viewed the matter in this light,” followed by questions as to how a positive expression of German indigenism might be fostered. “Actually,” I said, “it seems to me you’re already doing this. It's all in how you look at things and how you go about explaining them to others. Try this: You have currently, as a collective response to perceived problems of centralization within the German left, atomized into what you call autonomen. These can be understood as a panorama of autonomous affinity groups bound together in certain lines of thought and action by a definable range of issues and aspirations.66 Correct? So, instead of trying to explain this development to yourselves and everyone else as some ‘new and revolutionary tendency’—which it certainly is not—how about conceiving of it as an effort to recreate the kinds of social organization and political consensus marking your ancient ‘tribal’ cultures (adapted of course to the contemporary context)?
“Making such an effort to connect what you are doing to what was done quite successfully by your ancestors, and using that connection as a mode through which to prefigure what you wish to accomplish in the future, would serve to (re)contextualize your efforts in a way you’ve never before attempted. It would allow you to obtain a sense of your own cultural continuity which, at present, appears to be conspicuously absent in your struggle. It would allow you to experience the sense of empowerment which comes with reaching into your own history at the deepest level and altering outcomes you’ve quite correctly decided are unacceptable. This is as opposed to your trying to invent some entirely different history for yourselves. A project of this sort, if approached carefully and with considerable flexibility from the outset, could revitalize your struggle in ways which will astound you.
“Here's another possibility: You are at the moment seriously engaged in efforts to redefine power relations between men and women, and in finding ways to actualize these redefined relationships. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel in this respect, why not see it as an attempt to reconstitute in the modern setting the kind of gender balance that prevailed among your ancestors? Surely this makes as much sense as attempting to fabricate a whole new set of relations. And, quite possibly, it would enable you to explain your intentions in this regard to a range of people who are frankly skeptical right now, in a manner which would attract them rather than repelling them.
“Again: You are primarily an urban-based movement in which ‘squatting’ plays a very prominent role.67 Why not frame this in terms of liberating your space in very much the same way we approach the liberation of our land? The particulars are very different, but the principle involved seems to me to be quite similar. And it's likely that thinking of squatting in this way would lead you right back toward your traditional relationship to land/space. This seems even more probable when squatting is considered in combination with the experiments in collectivism and communalism which are its integral aspects. A lot of translation is required to make these connections, but that too is exactly the point. Translation between the concrete and the theoretical is always necessary in the formation of praxis. What I’m recommending is no different from any other approach in this respect. The question is whether these translations will serve to link political activity to reassertion of indigenous traditions, or to force an even further disjuncture in that regard. That's true in any setting, whether it's yours or ours. As I said, there are choices to be made.
“These are merely a few preliminary possibilities I’ve been able to observe during the short time I’ve been here,” I concluded. “I’m sure there are many others. What's important, however, is that we can and must all begin wherever we find ourselves. Start with what already exists in terms of resistance, link this resistance directly to your own native traditions, and build from there. The sequence is a bit different, but that's basically what we in the American Indian Movement have had to do. And we can testify that the process works. You end up with a truly organic and internally sustainable framework within which to engage in liberatory struggle. Plainly, this is something very different from Adolf Hitler's conducting of ‘blood rituals’ on the playing fields of Nuremberg,68 or Heinrich Himmler's convening of some kind of’Mystic Order of the SS’ in a castle at Wewelsburg,69 just as it's something very different from tripped-out hippies prancing about in the grass every spring pretending they’re ‘rediscovering’ the literal ceremonial forms of the ancient Celts, or a bunch of yuppies spending their off-hours playing at being American Indians. All of these are facets of the negative polarity you so rightly reject. I am arguing, not that you should drop your rejection of the negative, but that you should intensify your pursuit of its positive alternative. Let's not confuse the two. And let's not throw the baby out with the bath water. Okay?”
It is not necessary for crows to become eagles.
—Sitting Bull, 1888
Much of what has been said with regard to Germany can be transposed for application in North America, albeit there can be no suggestion that Euroamericans are in any way indigenous to this land (cutesy bumper stickers reading “Colorado Native” displayed by blond suburbanites notwithstanding). What is meant is that the imperative of reconnecting to their own traditional roots pertains as much, and in some ways more, to this dislocated segment of the European population as it does to their cousins who have remained in the Old World. By extension, the same point can be made with regard to the descendants of those groups of European invaders who washed up on the beach in other quarters of the planet over these past five hundred years: in various locales of South and Central America, for instance, and in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and much of Polynesia and Micronesia. In effect, the rule would apply wherever settler state colonialism has come into existence.70
Likely, it will be much more difficult for those caught up in Europe's far-flung diaspora to accomplish this than it may be for those still within the confines of their native geography. The latter plainly enjoy a much greater proximity to the sources of their indigenous traditions, while the former have undergone several generations of continuous indoctrination to see themselves as “new peoples” forging entirely new cultures.71 The sheer impossibility of this last has inflicted upon the Eurodiaspora an additional dimension of identity confusion largely absent among even the most conspicuously deculturated elements of the subcontinent itself. Rather than serving as a deterrent, however, this circumstance should be understood as heightening the urgency assigned the reconstructive task facing Euroamericans and others, elsewhere, who find themselves in similar situations.
By and large, the Germans have at least come to understand, and to accept, what nazism was and is. This has allowed the best among them to seek to distance themselves from it by undertaking whatever political action is required to destroy it once and for all.72 Their posture in this respect provides them a necessary foundation for resumption of cultural/spiritual traditions among themselves which constitute a direct and fully internalized antidote to the nazi impulse. In affecting this reconnection to their own indigenous heritage, the German dissidents will at last be able to see nazism—that logical culmination of so much of the predatory synthesis which is “Europe”—as being not something born of their own traditions, but something as alien and antithetical to those traditions as it was/is to the traditions of any other people in the world. In this way, by reintegrating themselves with their indigenous selves, they simultaneously reintegrate themselves with the rest of humanity.
In North America, by contrast, no such cognition can be said to have taken hold, even among the most politically developed sectors of the Euroamerican population. Instead, denial remains the norm. Otherwise progressive whites still seek at all costs to evade even the most obvious correlations between their own history in the New World and that of the nazis in the Old. A favorite intellectual parlor game remains the debate over whether genocide is “really” an “appropriate” term to describe the physical eradication of some 98 percent of the continent's native population between 1500 and 1900.73 “Concern” is usually expressed that comparisons between the U.S. governments assertion of its “Manifest Destiny” to expropriate through armed force about 97.5 percent of all native land, and the nazis’ subsequent effort to implement what they called “lebensraumpolitik”— the expropriation through conquest of territory belonging to the Slavs, and other “inferior” peoples only a couple of generations later—might be “misleading” or “oversimplified.”74
The logical contortions through which Euroamericans persist in putting themselves in order to avoid reality are sometimes truly amazing. A salient example is that of James Axtell, a white “revisionist” historian prone to announcing his “sympathies” with Indians, who has repeatedly gone on record arguing in the most vociferous fashion that it is both “unfair” and “contrary to sound historiography” to compare European invaders and settlers in the Americas to nazis. His reasoning? Because, he says, the former were, “after all, human beings. They were husbands, fathers, brothers, uncles, sons, and lovers. And we must try to reach back in time to understand them as such.”75 Exactly what he thinks the nazis were if not human beings fulfilling identical roles in their society, is left unstated. For that matter, Axtell fails to address how he ever arrived at the novel conclusion that either the nazis or European invaders and Euroamerican settlers in the New World consisted only of men.
A more sophisticated ploy is the ready concession on the part of white activists/ theorists that what was done to America's indigenous peoples was “tragic,” even while raising carefully loaded questions suggesting that things are working out “for the best” in any event.76 “Didn’t Indians fight wars with one another?” the question goes, implying that the native practice of engaging in rough intergroup skirmishing—a matter more akin to full-contact sports like football, hockey, and rugby than anything else—somehow equates to Europe's wars of conquest and annihilation, and that traditional indigenous societies therefore stand to gain as much from Euroamerican conceptions of pacifism as anyone else.77 (You bet, boss. Left to our own devices, we’d undoubtedly have exterminated ourselves. Praise the Lord that y’all came along to save us from ourselves.)
Marxist organizations like the Revolutionary Communist Party USA express deep concern that native people's economies might have been so unrefined that we were commonly forced to eat our own excrement to survive, a premise clearly implying that Euroamerica's industrial devastation of our homelands has ultimately worked to our advantage, ensuring our “material security” whether we’re gracious enough to admit it or not.78 (Thanks, boss. We were tired of eating shit anyway. Glad you came and taught us to farm.79) The “cutting edge” ecologists of Earth First! have conjured up queries as to whether Indians weren’t “the continents first environmental pillagers”—they claim we beat all the woolly mammoths to death with sticks, among other things—meaning we were always sorely in need of Euroamerica's much more advanced views on preserving the natural order.80
White male anarchists fret over possible “authoritarian” aspects of our societies—“You had leaders, didn’t you? That's hierarchy!”81—while their feminist sisters worry that our societies may have been “sexist” in their functioning.82 (Oh no, boss. We too managed to think our way through to a position in which women did the heavy lifting and men bore the children. Besides, hadn’t you heard? We were all “queer,” in the old days, so your concerns about our being patriarchal have always been unwarranted.83) Even the animal rights movement chimes in from time to time, discomfited that we were traditionally so unkind to “non-human members of our sacred natural order” as to eat their flesh.84 (Hey, no sweat boss. We’ll jump right on your no-meat bandwagon. But don’t forget the sacred Cherokee Clan of the Carrot. You’ll have to reciprocate our gesture of solidarity by not eating any more fruits and vegetables either. Or had you forgotten that plants are nonhuman members of the natural order as well? Have a nice fast, buckaroo.)
Not until such apologist and ultimately white supremacist attitudes begin to be dispelled within at least that sector of Euroamerican society which claims to represent an alternative to U.S./Canadian business-as-usual can there be hope of any genuinely positive social transformation in North America. And only in acknowledging the real rather than invented nature of their history, as the German opposition has done long since, can they begin to come to grips with such things.85 From there, they too will be able to to position themselves—psychologically, intellectually, and eventually in practical terms—to step outside that history, not in a manner which continues it by presuming to appropriate the histories and cultural identities of its victims, but in ways allowing them to recapture its antecedent meanings and values. Restated, Euroamericans, like their European counterparts, will then be able to start reconnecting themselves to their indigenous traditions and identities in ways which instill pride rather than guilt, empowering themselves to join in the negation of the construct of “Europe” which has temporarily suppressed their cultures as well as ours.
At base, the same principle applies here that pertains “over there.” As our delegation put it repeatedly to the Germans in our closing remarks, “The indigenous peoples of the Americas can, have, and will continue to join hands with the indigenous peoples of this land, just as we do with those of any other. We are reaching out to you by our very act of being here, and of saying what we are saying to you. We have faith in you, a faith that you will be able to rejoin the family of humanity as peoples interacting respectfully and harmoniously—on the basis of your own ancestral ways—with the traditions of all other peoples. We are at this time expressing a faith in you that you perhaps lack in yourselves. But, and make no mistake about this, we cannot and will not join hands with those who default on this responsibility, who instead insist upon wielding an imagined right to stand as part of Europe's synthetic and predatory tradition, the tradition of colonization, genocide, racism, and ecocide. The choice, as we’ve said over and over again, is yours to make. It cannot be made for you. You alone must make your choice and act on it, just as we have had to make and act upon ours.” In North America, there will be an indication that affirmative choices along these lines have begun to emerge among self-proclaimed progressives, not when figures like Robert Bly are simply dismissed as being ridiculous kooks, or condoned as harmless irrelevancies,86 but when they come to be treated by “their own” as signifying the kind of menace they actually entail. Only when white males themselves start to display the sort of profound outrage at the activities of groups like the Men's Movement as is manifested by its victims—when they rather than we begin to shut down the movement's meetings, burn its sweat lodges, impound and return the sacred objects it desecrates, and otherwise make its functioning impossible—will we be able to say with confidence that Euroamerica has finally accepted that Indians are Indians, not toys to be played with by whoever can afford the price of the game. Only then will we be able to say that the “Indians ‘R’ Us” brand of cultural appropriation and genocide has passed, or at least is passing, and that Euroamericans are finally coming to terms with who they’ve been and, much more important, who and what it is they can become. Then, finally, these immigrants can at last be accepted among us upon our shores, fulfilling the speculation of the Duwamish leader Seattle in 1854: “We may be brothers after all.” As he said then, “We shall see.”87