OR “WHERE HAVE ALL THE BUFFALO GONE?”
In Chicago, Illinois, during April 1968, President Johnson spoke these words to a group assembled at a fundraising dinner: “I ask you if there is anybody in this room tonight who would trade where you are for where you were when you discovered this land?”
Shouts of “No, no, no” swept through the audience, and I could not help feeling that there must not have been any Indians in attendance that evening! When the President’s ancestors “discovered” America, the Indians were occupying their own land, governing their own affairs, and enjoying the natural endowments of an unspoiled environment.
If President Johnson had been greeted by a group of young Indian militants, he might have heard some unfamiliar rhetoric from the mouths of Indians. The cover story of Time magazine (February 10, 1970) includes the following not-so-reserved quotes from the Indian reservation:
The next time whites try to illegally clear our land, perhaps we should get out and shoot the people in the bulldozers.
It’s time that Indians got off their goddam asses and stopped letting white people lead them around by their noses. Even the name Indian is not ours. It was given to us by some dumb honky who got lost and thought he’d landed in India.
We weren’t meant to be tourist attractions for the master race.
Someday you’re going to feel like Custer, baby.
Undoubtedly there are some older Uncle Tom-Tom Indians who would insist such rhetoric does not represent true Indian sentiment; that it is just the opinion of a few young Indian radicals—the “Stokely” Running Horses and the “Rap” Black Clouds. But the conditions of Indian reservations in America today seem designed to produce more and more militant Indian rhetoric, just as the traditional myth of American history concerning the Indian is a continuing and deeply entrenched insult to Indian heritage and culture.
THE MYTH
The traditional myth of the Indian in American history has produced at least three different images in the minds of most Americans. First, there is the image of the noble savage, wild, undomesticated, living close to nature in spiritual communion with the natural elements. Jean Jacques Rousseau helped the noble savage concept along as explorers brought back word of their new “discoveries” inhabited by those who exemplified the “natural man.” In his Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality Among Men (1755), Rousseau wrote:
nothing can be more gentle than him [Man] in his primitive State, when placed by Nature at an equal Distance from the Stupidity of Brutes, and the pernicious good Sense of civilized Man; and equally confined by Instinct and Reason to the Care of providing against the Mischief which threatens him, he is withheld by natural Compassion from doing any Injury to others, so far from being ever so little prone even to return that which he has received. For according to the Axiom of the wise Locke, Where there is no Property, there can be no Injury. . . . The more we reflect on this State, the more convinced we shall be, that it was the least subject of any to Revolutions, the best for Man, and that nothing could have drawn him out of it but some fatal Accident, which, for the public good, should never have happened. The Example of the Savages, most of whom have been found in this Condition, seems to confirm that Mankind was formed ever to remain in it, that this Condition is the real Youth of the World, and that all ulterior Improvements have been so many Steps, in Appearance towards the Perfection of Individuals, but in Fact towards the Decrepitness of the Species.
Rousseau also cited the example of a North American Indian chief who was brought before the Court of London, where efforts were made to impress him with the relics of European “civilization.” Said Rousseau:
Our Arms appeared heavy and inconvenient to him; our Shoes pinched his Feet; our Cloaths incombered his Body; he would accept of nothing; at length, he was observed to take up a Blanket, and seemed to take great Pleasure in wrapping himself up in it. You must allow, said the Europeans about him, that this, at least, is an useful Piece of Furniture? Yes, answered the Indian, I think it almost as good as the Skin of a Beast.
The noble savage image lingers in America’s memory today as a quaint stage in the American experience, as good material for folklore, children’s stories, and sometimes adult novels; the wild innocence of the noble savage has been corrupted by a thousand stories into the stupidity of one, for example, who sells Manhattan Island for a few trinkets. This aspect of the traditional American myth sees the Indian as essentially ungrateful, reacting with hostility to the New World Settlers who came with all the benefits of European civilization, instead of being wise enough to assimilate with them.
The second image of the Indian is the ignoble savage—the fierce, ferocious, heartless, and relentless warrior who tortured his victims mercilessly, had a real fetish for scalping, and seemed to take special sadistic delight in massacring the women and children of lonely frontier settlers.
John Gorham Palfrey’s History of New England (1858–1890) provides an excellent example of the image of the ignoble savage. Speaking of King Philip’s war in which he led the Wampanoag Indians against the Plymouth pilgrims, Palfrey wrote:
And now, without provocation and without warning, they [the Indians] had given full sway to the inhuman passions of their savage nature. They had broken out into wild riot of pillage, arson, and massacre. By night they had crept up, with murderous intent, to the doors of dwellings familiar to them by the experience of old hospitality. They had torn away wives and mothers from ministrations to dying men, and children from their mothers’ arms, for death in cruel forms. They had tortured their prisoners with atrocious ingenuity. Repeatedly, after they rose in arms, overtures of friendship had been made to them. But whether they disregarded such proposals or professed to close with them, it was all the same. The work of massacre and ravage still went on. The ferocious creature had tasted blood, and could not restrain himself till he should be surfeited.
Palfrey’s words “wild riot of pillage” and “arson” have a very familiar ring to black folks. When oppressed people in America react to their oppression, American mythology always responds by calling them “rioters, looters and arsonists.”
But at least America has come to anticipate a reaction from black folks: America has even designated a riot season for the black community—July through August. During the summer of 1969 black folks failed to show up for their riot season, and all America got upset. White America asked, “Where were you? We had the tanks waiting.” I understand George Wallace was asked to comment on the lack of rioting in the black community during that summer, and he said, “Oh, you know those colored folks are lazy and shiftless. They just got tired!” Radio and television interviewers were always asking me the same question. Of course I didn’t really know the reason why black folks failed to show up for their riot season, but I always had an answer. I said, “The reason why there were so few riots in the black community during the summer of 1969 is that all our black leaders were in Northern Ireland serving as technical advisers.”
Personally, I think the reason for a lack of rioting was that black folks got tired of stealing all those bad, no-good products. During the summer of 1969 black folks decided to go underground—to study the consumer reports.
The third image of the Indian appears in the Time magazine cover story, in these words:
Then there is a recent image, often seen through air-conditioned automobile windows. Grinning shyly, the fat squaw hawks her woven baskets along the reservation highway, the dusty landscape littered with rusting cars, crumbling wickiups and bony cattle. In the bleak villages, the only signs of cheer are romping, round-faced children and the invariably dirty, crowded bar, noisy with the shouts and laughter of drunkenness.
Thus the image of the Indian as tourist attraction, a quaint but grim piece of Americana, and an obsessive consumer of “fire water.” Advertising agencies continue to perpetuate the latter image. A large distillery ran an ad with a picture of an Indian saying, “If I had whiskey this smooth I never would have called it fire water.”
Perhaps traditional American mythology is best answered by an excerpt from Indian mythology. Whereas American mythology is used to perpetuate the lie, Indian mythology (like all true mythology) is an ancient way of articulating the deep truths of life. The Cherokees tell the following story of “The Pretty Colored Snake”:
A long time ago there was a famous hunter who used to go all around hunting and always brought something good to eat when he came home. One day he was going home with some birds that he had shot, and he saw a little snake by the side of the trail. It was a beautifully colored snake with all pretty colors all over it, and it looked friendly too. The hunter stopped and watched it for a while. He thought it might be hungry, so he threw it one of his birds before he went home.
A few weeks later he was coming by the same place with some rabbits he had shot, and he saw the snake again. It was still very beautiful and seemed friendly, but it had grown quite a bit. He threw it a rabbit and said “hello” as he went on home.
Some time after that the hunter saw the snake again. It had grown very big, but it was still friendly and seemed to be hungry. The hunter was taking some turkeys home with him, so he stopped and gave the snake a turkey gobbler.
Then one time the hunter was going home that way with two buck deer on his back. By this time that pretty colored snake was very big and looked so hungry that the hunter felt sorry for him and give him a whole buck to eat. When he got home he heard that the people were going to have a stomp dance. All the Nighthawks came, and that night they were going around the fire, dancing and singing the old songs, when the snake came and started going around too, outside of where the people were dancing. That snake was so big and long that he stretched all around the people and the people were penned up. The snake was covered all over with all pretty colors and he seemed friendly; but he looked hungry too, and the people began to be afraid.
They told some of the boys to get their bows and arrows and shoot the snake. Then the boys got their bows. They all shot together and they hit the snake all right. That snake was hurt. He thrashed his tail all around and killed a lot of people.
They say that snake was just like the white man.
The late Senator Robert F. Kennedy visited the Fort Hall, Idaho, Reservation with other members of the Indian Education Subcommittee. Two days after the visit, a sixteen-year-old Indian youth with whom the Senator had been chatting committed suicide. He had been confined in the county jail without a hearing and without his parents’ knowledge, because he had been accused of drinking during school hours. The Indian lad hanged himself from a pipe extending across the cell. Two other Indians from the same reservation had committed suicide in the same cell, using the same pipe, during the preceding year. One was a seventeen-year-old Indian girl from the same school.
Life on the Indian reservation is so disoriented from a future of hope and promise that the suicide rate among Indian teenagers reaches as high as ten times the national average. Those Indian teenagers who survive suicidal impulses can look forward to dying some twenty-five years before other Americans, as the average Indian dies at age forty-four. The life expectancy of white Americans is now seventy-one. Alaskan natives die on the average by age thirty-five.
Ninety percent of housing on the Indian reservations is considered substandard by government guidelines. Some 70 percent of Indians on reservations haul water a mile or more from its source. The average Indian family income in America is $1,500 a year. Yet if the money spent annually for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and governmental agencies working with Indians were divided up among Indians themselves, every Indian would receive $4,000 or more.
Unemployment runs as high as 80 percent on some Indian reservations. And government often perpetuates that unemployment. A few years ago I joined the Nisqualy Indians in the state of Washington in a “fish-in” demonstration. Indians who were once prosperous fishermen now go hungry because the state will not allow them to fish. The state of Washington spends up to $2,000 per salmon to protect these fish for sportsmen and commercial fisheries, which catch over 90 percent of them. Indians catch less than 10 percent. Even though the right to fish forever was promised to the Indians in exchange for taking away their land, the state of Washington refuses to permit Indians to enjoy this right.
Indians have 12.2 times the chance of alcohol-related arrests as the average white American. Disease on the Indian reservations is appalling. The lack of medical personnel and facilities is even more appalling. That pestilence mentioned earlier still plagues the Indian reservations. Infant mortality among Indians is the highest in the nation. Of every 1,000 babies born on the Indian reservations, the death rate is 32.2 (compared with 23.7 nationally), and on some reservations the rate reaches a staggering 100 deaths per 1,000 births. That’s about twice the infant mortality rate in the worst black ghettos of America and four times the death rate among white babies.
The Indian mortality rate for influenza and pneumonia is double the national average. The tuberculosis death rate for Indians is 500 percent higher than the national average. Indians whose ancestors taught the Pilgrims how to plant food suffer today from hunger and malnutrition more than any other group of Americans now occupying their land. Yet there is one doctor to every 900 Indians on the reservations and one dentist to every 2,900. Many Indians must travel some 100 miles to a clinic, only to find a line of 300 people waiting ahead of them, and leave at the end of the day without seeing a doctor or receiving medical attention.
Then there is the matter of education on the Indian reservations. The dropout rate among Indians is 60 percent, more than twice the national average. The average years of schooling among reservation Indians is 5.5 years. The Bureau of Indian Affairs spends about $18 per year per child on textbooks and supplies, compared with a national average of $40. Over and over again it is proved that allowing the current Bureau of Indian Affairs to be in charge of the “Indian problem” is like giving the Ku Klux Klan the authority to implement the Civil Rights Acts.
Why do Indian children fail to take advantage of the white man’s educational offerings? Look in on a Chippewa reservation classroom in the Northwest. The children are busily writing a composition. Their topic is scrawled out in chalk on the blackboard: “Why we are all happy the Pilgrims landed.”
A WAY-OUT VIEW
Perhaps the best way to uncover the reality of white-Indian relations in this country is to imagine a visitor coming to America from another planet. I hesitate to employ that image because of the way America handled her first lunar landing. I happened to be watching the first moon shot on television on an Indian reservation. You can imagine the reaction among Indians when the astronauts came out of their module and planted a sign reading “We come in peace.”
Then the astronauts had only been on the surface of the moon for five minutes when they decided there was no life there. They called for full speed ahead on scientific testing, including the shooting of the laser beam. Suppose the situation had been reversed and some moononauts had landed on earth. Only they landed in the middle of the desert in Arizona. Since they didn’t know anything about the rest of the planet earth, they would assume the desert was pretty typical.
Can’t you just hear the conversation between the moononauts and Tranquility Central Control? MOONONAUTS: “Earth to Moon. We’ve landed safely.” CONTROL: “What’s it like?” MOONONAUTS: “Well, we can’t use our regular kangaroo leap. We have to walk slue-footed and pigeontoed.” CONTROL: “Is there any life on earth?” MOONONAUTS: “No, we can’t see any signs of life. Go ahead and shoot the laser beam.” And right away the beam would wipe out New York City.
Now suppose that just the week before the earth landing at the same spot in the desert the Shriners had just held their annual picnic. And that a little farther away the army had been testing some of their nerve gas. And that just a little bit beyond that point the Ku Klux Klan had just held a membership rally.
So the moononauts would start picking up specimens of the earth’s crust. They’d pick up an empty whisky bottle or beer can left over from the Shriners’ picnic. Can’t you just hear them saying, “Isn’t that strange? You can see right through the earth’s crust.” Walking a few more steps, the moononauts would pick up an empty nerve gas canister, still thinking it was part of the earth’s crust. Finally they’d find a Ku Klux Klan membership card and put it in the sack.
When the moononauts got back home, they would give their specimens of the earth’s crust to some brilliant moon scientists. The scientists would take the beer can, the whisky bottle, the nerve gas canister, and the Ku Klux Klan membership card, grind them up into earth dust and feed it to a black mouse. And the mouse would die.
The moon scientists would hold a press conference and announce: “Yes, we’ve found that the earth is definitely contaminated and not fit for human habitation.” And you know they wouldn’t be far off?
But suppose a visitor came to America from another planet and was given a fresh look at American history as a neutral observer. Suppose also that our other planetary outside illuminator was given a definition of the word “savage”: “adj. Of or pertaining to the forests; in a state of nature; n. A brutal person; also, one lacking in civility or manners; v.t. To attack savagely; to treat with savagery.” Suppose finally that the visitor were asked to look at two groups of people—the settlers who came to America and the Indians who were already here—and to decide which group best embodied the definition of the word “savage.”
The visitor would see that the Indian was a deeply religious and mystical person. His religion was a worship of and communion with nature itself. The Narrative of Black Elk states: “Is not the sky a father and the earth a mother and are not all living things, with feet and wings or roots their children?” Respect for nature and nature’s processes was a religious duty for the Indian. The thought of defiling nature is abhorrent to Indian culture, as reflected in an Indian proverb:
The frog does not
Drink up
The pond in which
He lives.
Perhaps the visitor would interview Paul Bernal, a Pueblo Indian, who would explain:
It is said, years ago, many years ago, when the Indian was alone in his country, he cherished every little thing. He cherished the auger, the bow, the stones, the buffalo hide, the deerskin to make moccasins with. He cherished the corn, the kernel of corn that he planted with his hands to make his flour, his bread. He cherished the trees. He believed the trees had a heart, like a human being. He never cut down a living tree. A tree was a living thing. It was not to be cut, or hurt, or burned.
Every living thing that grew from the green earth of nature, he cherished.
In the skies he cherished the king of the flying species—the eagle. He cherished the little birds as well. He cherished the skies and stars as well.
He cherished human beings, all people, most of all. He cherished himself.
The visitor would also see that the white settler was religious in a quite different way. His religion was Christianity which in practice did not seem to respect either nature itself or human life as profoundly as did the Indian’s religion. The white Christian came bringing his cross. He cut down the forests, the Indian’s church, to make both the cross and his own church. It is obvious that the Indian would feel the same way seeing his trees cut down as a modern-day preacher would feel seeing his church blown up or burned to the ground.
I have had personal experience with the contradictions of white Christianity. I got my first taste of such contradictions when I was very young. A white Christian minister came up to me one day and said, “Boy”—that’s how I knew he was a white Christian—“what do you want to do when you grow up?” I said, “Oh, Mr. White Christian, I wants to go to Africa and visit my ancestors!” With a look of pious horror, Mr. White Christian said, “Why would you want to have anything to do with those uncivilized people? Your ancestors are cannibals.”
Reflecting my childhood innocence, I said, “Canni—who?”
“Cannibals, boy. Your ancestors eat folks.”
“Oooee! You mean they eat real live people?”
I was so shocked and ashamed that I followed Mr. White Christian into his church to pray. I fell on my knees and asked God to forgive my ancestors. “Please, God,” I prayed, “forgive my ancestors for being so uncivilized that they eat people.”
Mr. White Christian heard my prayer and came over to me. “We don’t usually let colored boys in this church,” he said. “But I like the way you pray. I want you to stay and have communion with us.” “Thank you, Mr. White Christian,” I said. “But what’s communion?” “Just get down on your knees and I’ll show you,” Mr. White Christian replied.
So I got down on my knees at the altar rail with the other folks, and Mr. White Christian rubbed my head for luck and handed me a piece of bread and a cup of grape juice and said, “This is his body and this is his blood.” So I decided then and there I would have to add Mr. White Christian to my prayer!
And the visitor would see that the white settlers went further than just cutting down trees in their disrespect for nature. They also polluted the waters, the rivers, lakes, and streams, even the air they breathed. The visitor could not help noticing a disrespect for human life. He would see that as the white population in the United States had multiplied over and over again, the Indian population had dwindled to far less than half its number when the settlers arrived.
The visitor would notice further the continuing stockpiling of munitions for war and killing; the billions of dollars being spent for bombs and dynamite while Indians and other minorities in America continued to starve.
Analyzing such information, any neutral observer would have to decide that the Indian fits the definition of simple nobility. Guess who would be cited as a brutal savage?
THE MARKS OF SAVAGERY
One of the marks of pure savagery is a tendency to desecrate temples and willfully destroy places of worship. Hebrew leaders felt that the Roman emperors were treacherous and savage when they descrated Jewish temples, just as decent-thinking people in America viewed the bombing of a black church in Birmingham, Alabama, as a ferociously savage act. Yet desecration of Indian temples continues today with government approval.
Paul Bernal, of Taos Pueblo, had always trusted the white man to look out for the Indian’s continuing fight for survival. The Taos Pueblo Indians were struggling to protect their religious shrine, Blue Lake, and the lands surrounding it. Bernal tells of a conversation he had with Senator Clinton Anderson, one of the white men he had trusted.
I said to Senator Anderson: “I know little white men and medium-sized white men and big white men. I know the biggest white man of all. But that does not frighten me.”
I said to Senator Anderson: “Just because you are a big white man and I am a little, merely an Indian, does not mean that I will do what you say. No!” I said: “My people will not sell our Blue Lake that is our church, for $10 million, and accept three thousand acres, when we know that fifty thousand acres is ours. We cannot sell what is sacred. It is not ours to sell.”
I said to Senator Anderson: “Only God can take it away from us. Washington is not God. The U. S. Senate is not God.”
I said to Senator Anderson: “Why do you want to steal our sacred land?”
Senator Anderson said: “Paul, I like you. But there is timber on that land, millions of dollars of timber.”
I said to Senator Anderson: “It is our sacred land. We will wait.”
Even if the myth of the pure religious intentions and the good faith of the white settlers of America is given credibility, when those white settlers have to run the Indians out to enact their religious program, or force and trick the Indians into going along with it, the pure religious intentions are already corrupted. And the childhood play song sung by millions of children in America—“Ten little, nine little, eight little Indians”—is a continuing reminder of the genocidal policy of extermination enacted against the Indians.
One hundred years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the New York Times reported, July 7, 1876, that there were “high officers” in the War Department who advocated “the policy of extermination of the Indians and think the speedier, the better, its accomplishment.” Indian wars were “wars of annihilation” to these officers according to the Times.
Indian testimony indicates that once again the War Department got its way:
Once we were happy in our own country and we were seldom hungry, for then the two-leggeds and the four-leggeds lived together like relatives, and there was plenty for them and for us. But the Wasichus [white man] came, and they have made little islands for us and other little islands for the four-leggeds, and always these islands are becoming smaller, for around them surges the gnawing flood of the Wasichu; and it is dirty with lies and greed.
Writing about the same time as John Gorham Palfrey, 1860, Peter Oliver held a different view of the Wampanoag Indians, King Philip, and their relationship to the Plymouth Pilgrims. He saw the Indians as victims of their own hospitality. Oliver wrote:
Though “even like lions” to the rest of their neighbors, yet to the starving, feeble band of Independents, who intruded upon their shores, the Wampanoags had been “like lambs, so kind, so submissive and trusty, as a man may truly say many Christians are not so kind or so sincere.” But how were they requited? Suffice it that Massasoit, though called an “enemy to Christianity,” continued a firm friend of the Plymouth settlers until his death; that his eldest son and successor, Wamsutta, renewed the league of amity, which existed between his father and Plymouth; and, as if to seal the friendly compact, accepted from the governor of that colony the name of Alexander, which he retained during his brief career; that, a few years after, Alexander died of a broken heart, on account of his ignominious treatment by that colony, which, without cause, suspected his fidelity; that his brother, Metacom, who also had accepted the name of Philip, pardoning this outrage, ratified a compact, which was fast ruining the wild glory of his race; and that these leagues or treaties were entirely of an ex parte nature, enuring favorably to the English, and being of no manner of benefit to the Indians. For, in what position did Philip find his people, when called upon to direct their affairs? Their lands, formerly extending from the easterly boundary of the Narragansetts to the westerly limits of what is now the county of Plymouth, in Massachusetts, and comprehending generally the present county of Bristol, were, for the most part, in the hands of the English, and the native proprietors were confined to a few tongues of land, jutting out into the sea, the chief of which is now known as Bristol, in Rhode Island. These necks of land were alone, of all their possessions, rendered by the Plymouth laws inalienable by the Indians; partly, it was said, because they were “more suitable and convenient” for them, and partly because the English were of a “covetous disposition,” and the natives, when in need, were “easily prevailed upon to part with their lands.” Here, then, Philip found his people huddled together, by the insidious policy of the Plymouth Colony, surrounded on three sides by the ocean, and, on the fourth, hemmed in by the ever-advancing tide of civilization. And this was all that forty years of friendship with “the Pilgrims” had benefited the Wampanoags.
Another mark of savagery, of course, is the practice of scalping. Most Americans think that Indians invented the practice. It is difficult to pin down its precise origin, but it is clear that scalping and practices close to it were not unfamiliar to Europeans before their arrival in America. Poachers in England were punished by having their ears cut off. Certainly the European settlers introduced the practice of scalping to some tribes of Indians who had never scalped before.
The white settlers must take credit for the practice of paying for scalps, however. Bounties were set on dead Indians, and the scalp was proof of the deed. Governor Kieft of New Netherland is generally credited with originating the idea. He felt scalps were easier to handle than the whole Indian head. The going Dutch price was so high for scalps that they virtually cleared southern New York and New Jersey of Indians before the English got there.
By 1703 the colony of Massachusetts was paying the equivalent of about $60 for every Indian scalp. Pennsylvania’s scalp rate by the mid-eighteenth century was $134 for males and only $50 for females. It is said that some entrepreneurs with an eye for making a buck simply hatcheted any old Indians who still survived and sold their scalps.
Today black folks are said to be preoccupied with cutting. But the white man at war with the Indian surpassed any Saturday night cutting on a ghetto street corner. Lieutenant James D. Connor, of the New Mexico Volunteers, described before the United States Senate what happened to Cheyenne at the Battle of Sand Creek:
In going over the battlefield the next day I did not see a body of [an Indian] man, woman, or child but was scalped, and in many instances the bodies were mutilated in the most horrible manner—men, women, and children’s privates cut out, etc. One man [said] he had cut out a woman’s private parts and had them for exhibition on a stick . . .
I heard of numerous instances in which men had cut out the private parts of females and stretched them over the saddlebows, and wore them in their hats while riding in the ranks. . . .
General George Custer justified such acts of savagery because he felt the Indians themselves were savages. His motto seemed to be, “Do unto the savage as you think the savage might want to do unto you.” Custer believed that the Indian was “savage in every sense of the word,” having “a cruel and ferocious nature [that] far exceeds that of any wild beast of the desert.” Custer rejected the image of the noble savage by saying that the “beautiful romance [of] the noble red man” who was a “simple-minded son of nature” was “equally erroneous with that which regards the Indian as a creature possessing human form.” So Custer felt that such “wild beasts” should not be “judged by rules or laws [of warfare] applicable to any other race of men.”
So rules of warfare were suspended, and Indians were given blankets, for example, infected with smallpox, thus establishing a precedent for germ warfare. Folk hero Kit Carson was really given his name by the Indians. Indians called him “Kid” Carson because he killed more Indian children than any other white man. Carson’s fighting companions were known by the Indians as the “Long Knives of Kit Carson,” because of their bayonets. The “Long Knives” would cut off the breasts of Navajo girls and then toss the severed breasts back and forth like baseballs. These are the Wild West heroes American history remembers, and there was even a Boy Scout troop on the Navajo reservation named after Kit Carson.
The true savage can be expected to bite the hand that feeds him and kill the man who keeps him alive. Whereas the white settlers brought disease to the New World, the Indian has given at least fifty-nine drugs to modern medicine, including coca (for cocaine and novocaine), curare (a muscle relaxant), cinchona bark (the source of quinine), cascara sagrada (a laxative), datura (a pain reliever), and ephedrine (a nasal remedy). In return the white man has given the Indians millions of Excedrin headaches. The Indian introduced tobacco; the white man learned to inhale it and get cancer. The Indian produced cotton; the white man got some slaves to pick it. The Indian has influenced fashion (jewelry, clothing and blanket designs, moccasins) and relaxation (smoking pipes, hammocks, canoes, snowshoes, toboggans) and provided the names for countless towns, cities, states, lakes, mountains, rivers, and other geographical sites. Whereas the Indian taught the white settlers how to survive, the white man attacks the Indian’s very source of life. Indians remember the now extinct bison:
That fall [1883], they say, the last of the bison herd was slaughtered by Wasichus. I can remember when the bison were so many that they could not be counted, but more and more Wasichus came to kill them until there were only heaps of bones scattered where they used to be. The Wasichus did not kill them to eat; they killed them for the metal that makes them crazy, and they took only the hides to sell. Sometimes they did not even take the hides, only the tongues; and I have heard that fireboats came down the Missouri loaded with dried bison tongues. You can see that the men who did this were crazy.
The Indian observed that white America was crazy. Money made white folks do crazy things. The Indian had medicinal drugs, but he didn’t have a dope problem. Nor did he have a drinking problem until the white man introduced him to “fire water” and made life so unbearable that the Indian had to drink as a form of escape.
But that practice is not new to America. Alcoholic beverages were brought to America at least by 1607 with the settling of Virginia. Twelve years later the good religious folks of Virginia Colony were experiencing a booze problem. A law was passed decreeing that any person found drunk for the first time was to be reproved privately by the minister; the second time publicly; and the third time to “lye in halter” for twelve hours and pay a fine. The very same year, however, the Virginia Assembly passed other legislation encouraging the production of wines and distilled spirits in the colony.
When a person is sick, and the doctor comes to examine the patient, the doctor usually insists, “You’ve got to get a lot of rest. You’ve got to take off from work. You’ve got to go to bed early, and most of all you must quit drinking.” The person who is really sick has no business fooling around with alcohol. That is the biggest problem in this nation today. Sick Americans refuse to stop drinking.
Perhaps if American parents would put down their cocktail glasses for a moment and take a sober look at the narcotics problem, they would understand what is happening in America today. Governmental response to dope traffic is nothing less than savage. That savagery is best represented by the Nixon administration’s Operation Intercept. In 1969, taking a leaf from his Vietnam notebook, President Nixon began dealing with the Mexican government to shut off the flow of marijuana from Mexico into the United States. Just as the United States teamed up with the government of South Vietnam to spray napalm on the villages of North Vietnam, the federal government spearheaded the spraying of marijuana fields in Mexico.
A stop-and-search campaign was begun at the Mexican border to cut off the flow of any pot (marijuana) that survived the spraying. Tourists were annoyed as traffic jams at the border backed up for miles, and businessmen were annoyed because the tourists were annoyed. But Operation Intercept was successful, as any pot smoker in a large urban area could testify.
Marijuana became very scarce, and the price skyrocketed. But there was a curious accompanying phenomenon to the pot depletion. Hard narcotics, such as heroin, became cheaper and more available. A teenager from New York City’s Lower East Side, unable to obtain marijuana and fast becoming a heroin user, told me that bags of heroin formerly costing five or six dollars were suddenly available for two or three dollars.
His statistics were substantiated in official places. Dr. Michael Braden, New York City’s associate medical examiner and a specialist in addiction problems, testified before hearings of the Joint Legislative Committee (New York) on Protection of Children and Youth and Drug Abuse, saying that Operation Intercept had helped to drive the price of marijuana so high that it had become competitive with heroin. Speaking of the rise of the use of hard narcotics among youth, Dr. Braden estimated that of New York City’s 100,000 addicts, 25,000 were below the age of twenty. He said that 250 teenagers would die from the use of heroin by the end of the year—a new record. At the time of Dr. Braden’s testimony in 1969 the total number of deaths related to heroin use thus far for the year in New York was 700.
One would think that a real narcotics crackdown would begin with heroin and work down to the lighter stuff. Doesn’t it seem strange that an administration that fought so hard for an antiballistic system to save our country from destruction does not fight equally hard for an antinarcotics system to prevent the slow destruction of our nation’s youth? Since hard narcotics, such as heroin, are controlled by organized crime, one can only assume that Russia is the Nixon administration’s enemy and the Cosa Nostra its friend. How else can one explain the maintenance of a watchful eye on Russia and overlooking the continuing activities of the Mafia in smuggling hard narcotics?
Not long after Operation Intercept, President Pompidou of France came to pay President Nixon a visit. President Pompidou also visited other cities in America, where he was met by protest demonstrations, calling for peace in the Middle East. President Nixon was so upset by such demonstrations (though even Mayor Daley of Chicago complimented demonstrators in his city for “the orderly manner in which they exercised their rights as American citizens”) that he flew to the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York City, substituting for Vice President Spiro Agnew, to offer personal apologies to President Pompidou for the actions of antiwar protestors.
President Nixon should have apologized to grief-stricken American mothers and fathers whose sons and daughters have died from overdoses of heroin. President Nixon knows the route of heroin traffic into America. About 80 percent of the heroin entering this country illegally is the end product of the opium harvest in Turkey. The traffic starts with the Turkish farmer who diverts part of his crop to smugglers. They either get it out of the country or arrange to extract the morphine base from the opium while it is still in Turkey. Morphine base is a crude brown heroin that has to be bleached and further refined; since ten kilos of opium reduces to one kilo of morphine base, it is in the interest of the narcotics traffickers to get it reduced if they can for more profitable smuggling.
Then the morphine base is taken to the clandestine heroin laboratories of southern France for further refining. President Pompidou’s country thus aids in the conversion of a product whose value starts at $8 and ends up in America in the millions. One wonders if President Nixon mentioned that issue to President Pompidou while they were extolling the virtues of French-American friendship.
Could it be that the Nixon administration would rather see the youth of America hooked on heroin than using marijuana? It is not uncommon for the use of marijuana, being “turned on” to pot, to accompany social and political awareness. Not so with the use of heroin and other hard drugs. A hard narcotics user’s main concern is with keeping his needle supplied. The pot smoker may want to change the system. The hard narcotics user will destroy himself. Even Hitler in all his madness did not encourage the flower of his nation, Germany’s youth, to shoot anything but guns!
I can never accept the rationalization that law enforcement cannot find the narcotics man. I could go into any city in America where heroin is being used, and fifteen minutes after my arrival I could have made a contact to purchase some dope. Fifteen minutes after making that contact I could have the heroin running through my veins. If it is that easy for a newcomer to a city, why is it the police, who work there every day, many of whom have lived there all their lives, can never seem to be able to find the narcotics suppliers? If the police sincerely cannot find them, perhaps we should make the users the police because they never have any trouble recognizing a pusher!
Once again an Indian comment is the best summation. Janet McCloud, speaking at the Law Day ceremonies of the University of Washington Law School, May 1, 1969, said:
You have a very complicated legal system. It is not that way with my people. I have always thought that you had so many laws because you were a lawless people. Why else would you need so many laws? After all, Europe opened all prisons and penitentiaries and sent all their criminals to this country. Perhaps that is why you need so many laws. I hope we never have to reach such an advanced state of civilization.
PILGRIMS AND STATESMEN
The key to exploding the myth of the savage is to destroy the “discovery hoax.” If Americans, white or black, can believe that their ancestors “discovered” the New World, the door is left open for understanding if not justifying all that went along with occupying their “discovery.” It is true that black men were numbered among the early explorers the same as whites. Black participation in exploration and so many other facets of American life are forgotten pages in American history and will be dealt with in subsequent chapters. But the Indian was the pure pilgrim in America. The white man is a newcomer to the American experience, whereas the Indian’s roots go back twenty-five thousand years.
The Indian’s ancestors apparently abandoned their home in what is now the Gobi Desert, traveled across the Bering Strait into Alaska, and from that initial arrival eventually settled the New World. They found an unmolested, beautiful reservoir of natural resources and developed a mystical religion and high culture in deep communion with nature itself. So the pure pilgrims, the Indian ancestors, exemplified a true reverence for life and a worship of nature itself rather than imposing a religious standard upon native occupants.
Vine Deloria, Jr., sums it up in his book Custer Died for Your Sins by saying that the Western Hemisphere or the land of the Indians produced wisdom, whereas Western Europe produced knowledge. That crucial distinction continues to plague life in America today. Wisdom is understanding how to live. Knowledge is used to make a living. The distinction is apparent in the colleges and universities of America today, and it is one of the reasons for student unrest. When I was in college, my fellow students and I were so busy trying to learn how to make a living that we forgot to learn how to live. If a student uses his college years to truly learn how to live, making a living will be the easiest thing in the world for him.
I hear so many people say, “I’m going to college to learn how to be somebody.” But every man is born somebody. If he lets someone teach him to be somebody else, that makes him two people. Check and see what Sigmund Freud says happens to a man when he becomes two folks. It doesn’t make sense to go away to college for four years and pay top money to be taught to be crazy!
Then people say, “You have to eat to live. I’m going to college so I can get a good job and eat.” A gorilla eats more food in one meal than most people eat all week. Have you ever known a gorilla to go to college to get a job? When you were shopping in a supermarket, have you ever bumped into a gorilla? When is the last time you read where a gorilla starved to death? You will never read about a gorilla starving as long as he knows how to live. But the first time a gorilla decides he wants to make a living, there will be colleges for gorillas too.
A man is born with all the wisdom he needs for life. The Indian understands this. All a college or a university can do is bring out the wisdom nature has already implanted. The Indian understands the power and wisdom of nature and man’s relationship to nature. Each man is the universe. Each man is nature. There are nine planets to the universe, and each person has nine holes in his body. That is no accident.
Let me illustrate how strong nature is. Very few people reading this book will understand Chinese. Yet at this very moment, dogs in China understand Chinese, and they have never been to college. Dogs in Russia understand Russian, and dogs in Germany understand German. Yet many people graduate from college understanding only their native tongue, which a dog knows instinctively.
Colleges and universities in America are so disoriented from nature that emphasis is placed upon indoctrination rather than education. Education means to bring out wisdom. Indoctrination means to push in knowledge. The transcript of grades is used as a measure of how well the indoctrination process has succeeded. But nature is not interested in college transcripts. If a student leaves college, falls in love and decides to get married, a husband or a wife will not ask to see the college transcript nor will either sexual partner want that transcript in bed.
The Indian respected nature and learned how to live, and that wisdom informed all of his actions. Even his speech, as Thomas Jefferson recognized. Jefferson wished that the men of Congress could orate half as well as the Indian. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson offered an example of Indian eloquence:
I may challenge the whole orations of Demosthenes and Cicero, and of any more eminent orator, if Europe has furnished more eminent, to produce a single passage, superior to the speech of Logan, a Mingo chief, to Lord Dunmore, when governor of this state. And, as a testimony of their talents in this line, I beg leave to introduce it, first stating the incidents necessary for understanding it. In the spring of the year 1774, a robbery was committed by some Indians on certain land-adventurers on the river Ohio. The whites in that quarter, according to their custom, undertook to punish this outrage in a summary way. Captain Michael Cresap, and a certain Daniel Greathouse, leading on these parties, surprized, at different times, travelling and hunting parties of the Indians, having their women and children with them, and murdered many. Among these were unfortunately the family of Logan, a chief celebrated in peace and war, and long distinguished as the friend of the whites. This unworthy return provoked his vengeance. He accordingly signalized himself in the war which ensued. In the autumn of the same year a decisive battle was fought at the mouth of the Great Kanhaway, between the collected forces of the Shawanese, Mingoes, and Delewares, and a detachment of the Virginia militia. The Indians were defeated, and sued for peace. Logan however disdained to be seen among the suppliants. But lest the sincereity of a treaty should be distrusted, from which so distinguished a chief absented himself, he sent by a messenger the following speech to be delivered to Lord Dunmore.
“I appeal to any white man to say, if ever he entered Logan’s cabin hungry, and he gave him not meat; if ever he came cold and naked, and he clothed him not. During the course of the last long and bloody war, Logan remained idle in his cabin, an advocate for peace. Such was my love for the whites, that my countrymen pointed as they passed, and said, ‘Logan is the friend of white men.’ I had even thought to have lived with you, but for the injuries of one man. Col. Cresap, the last spring, in cold blood, and unprovoked, murdered all the relations of Logan, not sparing even my women and children. There runs not a drop of my blood in the veins of any living creature. This called on me for revenge. I have sought it: I have killed many: I have fully glutted my vengeance. For my country, I rejoice at the beams of peace. But do not harbour a thought that mine is the joy of fear. Logan never felt fear. He will not turn on his heel to save his life. Who is there to mourn for Logan?—Not one.”
The wisdom of the Indian produced statesmanship and a better form of government than that later developed by the knowledge of European politicians. Vine Deloria, Jr., reminds us that true democracy was more prevalent among the Indian tribes before Columbus came to America than it has been since. “Despotic power,” says Deloria, “was abhorred by tribes that were loose combinations of hunting parties rather than political entities.” Some of America’s favorite statesmen marveled at the Indian form of government. Benjamin Franklin, in his Poor Richard’s Almanack, in 1775, spoke of the “great order and decency” in tribal life. And Franklin put his finger on the source of that order and decency. “The Savages,” wrote Franklin, had a society where “There is no force, there are no prisons, no officers to compel obedience or inflict punishment.”
So the Indians without mayors, governors, congressmen, or presidents were able to live happily in the present borders of the United States. Perhaps it is because they believed in and practiced community control. Community pressure, approval or disapproval of the members of the community, was relied upon more than vindictive punishment.
Eskimos in Alaska today use community approval or disapproval as a means of settling disputes. All disputes except murder are settled by the song duel, which seems to be a musical version of the longstanding ghetto game “dozens.” The parties in a dispute sing insults and obscenties at each other much to the delight of the audience. The audience decides who wins the song duel, and the loser receives community disapproval which is painful punishment in a group as small as that of the Eskimo.
Statesmen are wise men of uncompromising truth and honesty. Politicians are students of the art of compromise. Being statesmen, the Indians signed treaties with the white man in good faith. Being politicians, the white settlers and their ancestors have yet to honor a single Indian treaty. Yet all the while America continues to justify her current actions in Vietnam on the grounds that “the North Vietnamese have repeatedly violated the 1954 Geneva Accords.” America did not even sign the Geneva treaty. Yet she will send her troops ten thousand miles away to defend a treaty she didn’t sign while she violates Indian treaties at home.
Deloria reminds our government that the last Indian treaty to be broken, the Pickering Treaty of 1794 with the Seneca tribe of the Iroquois nation, was violated at the very time America’s bloody action in Vietnam was being justified as a commitment-keeping responsibility.
White America’s signing treaties with the Indians was pure politics from the very beginning. Self-interest is a more accurate description of America’s true motives than fidelity to commitments. Indian treaties were originally made either to keep peace on the frontier or to acquire land for white settlers. Both reflect strong self-interest motives. When foreign conquest appeared to be an imminent possibility, the United States was quick to sign agreements with the Indians to make sure they were on the right side.
“During the darkest days of the Revolution,” says Vine Deloria, Jr., “in order to keep the Indians from siding with the British and completely crushing the new little nation, the United States held out equality and statehood to the Delawares and any other tribes they could muster to support the United States. But when the shooting was all over the Delawares were forgotten in the rush to steal their land.”
The same thing happened during the War of 1812, when the United States government was eager to make sure Indians would not side with Great Britain. A treaty was signed with the Wyandots, the Delawares, the Shawnees, the Senecas, and the Miamis engaging them “to give their aid to the United States in prosecuting the war against Great Britain, and such of the Indian tribes as still continue hostile.” What was the final result of such honorable treaty commitment? Deloria gives the answer in these words: “Within a generation these same tribes that fought and died for the United States against Great Britain were to be marched to the dusty plains of Oklahoma, dropped in an alien and disease-ridden land, and left to disappear.”
Indians are still denied hunting and fishing rights, rights guaranteed by original treaties, but not honored by government. And they remain the long-suffering victims of outright land thefts, frequently for construction and transportation interests, again in violation of treaties made in good faith.
America’s commitment to treaties any place in the world cannot be taken seriously until full commitment to treaty obligations is faced at home. And America’s dealings with Indians display to the world her true motives. “America has always been a militantly imperialistic world power,” observes Deloria, “eagerly grasping for economic control over weaker nations.” America’s dealings with Indian tribes are a superb illustration of such motives.
WHO’LL BE THE INDIAN?
America’s basic sickness is illustrated by the fact that she has always chosen to play a game of cowboys and Indians. Every now and then America goes off to fight a war, but she always comes back home to resume playing cowboys and Indians.
America—Uncle Sam—has always been the cowboy, but the Indian role has changed over and over again. The Indian himself was the original Indian, of course. Then one day the Indian came to Uncle Sam and said, “Hey, Great White Father. Me don’t want to be your Indian no more. Me can’t play this game with you. You something else.” Uncle Sam said, “What’s the matter, redskin, can’t you take it?” The Indian answered, “No, white man, it’s not that. I can take all the punishment you lay on me except that one final insult. When you commit all the atrocities you do, and you display your sick degeneracy, and then you tell the world I’m the savage—no, white man, I can’t take that. Nobody is scared of death, white man, but you. So regardless of what you may do to me, I’m not going to play with you no more.”
Uncle Sam got very upset. He cried for a while, and he told the Indian he was being very unfair. Uncle Sam said resentfully, “Who do you think you are, telling me you won’t be the Indian any more. I’ll just lock you up on a reservation.” The Indian answered, “Do anything you want. You can wipe me out if you want to, but it won’t be in the game we used to play.”
After a little while Uncle Sam missed the Indian. He longed to play another game of cowboys and Indians, so he had to find himself a new Indian. Uncle Sam looked around and saw the Jew, and he decided the Jew would make a good Indian. So the Jew became the Indian and went along with the game for a while. Then one day the Jew came up to Uncle Sam and said, “Boss, I can’t be your Indian any more. You play too rough.” And again Uncle Sam got very uptight. He started calling the Jew some dirty names: “You long-nose Jew bastard. What do you mean telling me you’re not going to be the Indian any more? Just after I trained you how to be a good Indian!”
But the Jew held firm. He said, “Call me anything you want to, I still won’t be your Indian any more. But I’ll tell you what I will do. I’ll join up with you, and we’ll find somebody else to be the Indian.” The original Indian was too morally pure to ever make that offer. He would rather suffer the indignity of life on the reservation than participate in the sick, oppressive games America was playing.
So Uncle Sam looked around for a new Indian, and his eye fell upon the Irishman. Uncle Sam thought the Irishman was pretty ignorant and he might need a lot of training, but even so the Irishman would make a good Indian. So the Irishman became the Indian. But after a while the Irishman also came to Uncle Sam and said, “Boss, I can’t be your Indian any more. This game is no fun any more. But I’ll tell you what I will do. I’ll be your cop. You fix some bad laws and I’ll enforce them for you.”
Uncle Sam got upset again. He called the Irishman a dirty, doublecrossing, shanty bastard. And the Irishman said, “You can call me anything you want to call me. Just give me my uniform, my badge, my gun and a big stick, and I’ll deal with those names.”
Once more Uncle Sam needed a new Indian. He searched for a while and finally came across the Italian. Uncle Sam was very pleased because he could tell immediately that the Italian would make a good Indian. There was something about him. Uncle Sam didn’t know that in the earlier days of history Hannibal had put some black soul in the Italian.
So the Italian became the Indian, and Uncle Sam played the game very hard. Uncle Sam found two Italians who just didn’t act like good Indians, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, so he accused them of murder, placed them on trial, and condemned them to die. People all over the country, as well as in Latin America and Europe, were convinced Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent, and came out into the streets to protest their execution. Even the prosecuting attorney who had tried Sacco and Vanzetti went to the Governor on their behalf, saying he felt there was insubtantial evidence, but the Governor knew what Uncle Sam wanted and said, “Kill them damn ‘Indians,’ boy.”
Bartolomeo Vanzetti’s final words before the court that convicted him stand today as a classic reminder of the price Uncle Sam demands for refusing to be the Indian:
I have talk a great deal of myself but I even forgot to name Sacco. Sacco too is a worker from his boyhood, a skilled worker lover of work, with a good job and pay, a good and lovely wife, two beautiful children and a neat little home at the verge of a wood, near a brook. Sacco is a heart, a faith, a character, a man; a man lover of nature and of mankind. A man who gave all, who sacrifice all to the cause of Liberty and to his love of mankind; money, rest, mundane ambitions, his own wife, his children, himself and his own life. Sacco has never dreamt to steal, never to assassinate. He and I have never brought a morsel of bread to our mouths, from our childhood to today—which has not been gained by the sweat of our brows. Never.
Oh, yes, I may be more witful, as some have put it, I am a better babbler than he is, but many, many times in hearing his heartful voice ringing a faith sublime, in considering his supreme sacrifice, remembering his heroism I felt small small at the presence of his greatness and found myself compelled to fight back from my throat to not weep before him—this man called thief and assassin and doomed. But Sacco’s name will live in the hearts of the people and in their gratitude when Katzmann’s and your bones will be dispersed by time, when your name, his name, your laws, institutions, and your false god are but a dim rememoring of a cursed past in which man was wolf to man. . . .
If it had not been for these things, I might have live out my life talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have die, unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life could we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man’s understanding of man as now we do by accident. Our words—our lives—our pains—nothing! The taking of our lives—lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fishpeddler—all! That last moment belongs to us—that agony is our triumph.
One day the Italian came to Uncle Sam and said, “I just can’t be your Indian any more. You’ll have to get off my back.” Uncle Sam said, “What do you want to do?” The Italian said, “I’ll push a little dope for you. I’ll pull a little policy. As a matter of fact, I’ll do better than that. I’ll be your scapegoat and cover up for the real criminals in America, the wealthy families and the rich corporations.”
Just as Uncle Sam was looking for a new Indian to replace the Italian, black folks came to him and said, “Hey, white man, how come you don’t use us for the Indian?” And Uncle Sam said, “Boy, you’re already the nigger. You can’t be the Indian.” So black folks said, “That’s all right. We’ll be the Indian too.” Uncle Sam thought for a while and said, “Well, I don’t know what we can do in this game if you’re the Indian. With our Indians we usually rape the women and misuse the children and we’ve already done that to you.”
So black folks said, “The reason we want to be the Indian is that according to the rules of the game, you have to give us a little piece of land and some guns, because the Indian gets to shoot back. We’d be better off being the Indian than the slave.” Uncle Sam’s eyes lit up and he said, “You know you boys are right. We haven’t got anybody to shoot at.”
So black folks became the Indian, and they almost out-Indianed the Indian. Finally black folks also decided they didn’t want to be the Indian any more. But there was a sad difference in telling Uncle Sam. With all the other groups who had been the Indian, the adults went to Uncle Sam and said they didn’t want to play any more. With black folks, our kids carried that message. Some of the older black folks didn’t want to stop being the nigger or the Indian. So the young black kids said to Uncle Sam, “We’re not going to be your Indian any more. A few black folks still want to be your Indian, but don’t make the mistake of getting your Indians mixed up.”
In the early 1960s black folks began to say, “No more Indian games with us.” We said it with a new kind of rhetoric. We said it with Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and Medgar Evers and Father Groppi and the Black Panthers and the NAACP and the Urban League. But Uncle Sam didn’t want to let black folks stop being the Indian. He went back to all the other groups who had been the Indian before and said, “If black folks aren’t the Indians any more, you all might be in trouble.” Black folks were the first group that Uncle Sam decided to force to continue to be the Indian.
Before the 1960s were over, however, there was no doubt in Uncle Sam’s mind that black folks were not going to be the Indian any more, due to the efforts of Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown. Stokely and Rap said, “If you just stop looking like the Indian, Uncle Sam will understand. You can’t come up to him wearing all the war paint that makes you the Indian and say you aren’t going to be the Indian any more. Let your hair grow out the way nature gave it to you. Be yourself, black, beautiful and proud.”
So young black folks told Uncle Sam, “Not only are we not going to be your Indian any more, but we aren’t going to look like your Indian and we may decide to deal with you.” Of course there were some black folks who wanted to join Uncle Sam like the other groups had done, but Uncle Sam wouldn’t let them in. He said, “Get back over there, nigger. You might not be the Indian any more, but you’re still going to be the nigger—nigger!”
There were only two groups that didn’t join Uncle Sam’s posse: the original beautiful Indian because he didn’t want to join, and black folks because Uncle Sam wouldn’t let us join. Still some black folks kept trying to join. They are over in Vietnam today killing folks. When they come back home and realize their own momma needs to be liberated, they wouldn’t dare raise their guns.
One day in 1970, Uncle Sam got itching for another Indian. He said to himself, “Who’ll be the Indian? There’s nobody left but my own kids.” So Uncle Sam made his own white youth both the Indian and the new nigger. Uncle Sam never makes distinctions with his “Indians” and “niggers.” There are no distinctions between good and bad, right wing or left wing. All niggers and Indians look alike.
Abraham Lincoln once said that if America ever dies, it will be because she has committed suicide. By attacking her own kids, America has finally given full sway to her suicidal tendencies. What a man does to his own kids, he will do to everybody else.
If you follow me home one day and you see me grab my twelve-year-old daughter and hit her over the head with a stick and throw tear gas and Mace on her and stick her with a bayonet, you would say, “Brother Greg has gone crazy.” Even if I told you my daughter had just killed my wife, it wouldn’t make any difference. Nothing could justify my treating my own daughter in such a way. And America can never expect to shoot down her youth on the campus of Kent State University and hope to justify that act in the eyes of the world.