WITHIN THE INDIGENOUS world, there is an alternative network known as the Moccasin Telegraph — but that grid also exists in the NGO world, and sometimes overlaps. And one of the caminos that got me to the Vatican commenced with Sasha, a converted Rhodesian rock star, and in his own way an extraordinary man. Truth be told, I thought he had guts. He also had networks galore, ranging from the African tribes to Bono to tribal court justices to members of the Gore family and billionaire philanthropists I’d never heard of. But, one man would exercise a decisive impact upon the Long March to Rome — Bishop Riah, the Palestinian Israeli Anglican bishop who would clear the way to Rome from faraway Nazareth, birthplace of the Messiah.
I am still making my own discoveries of certain truths that only became evident long after the Long March to Rome. There is a currently popular book dividing the world between “somewheres” and “anywheres.” Really what the adman who wrote the book is borrowing is the division between settlers and migrants. The perception of the world of migrants is fluid, delicate, violent, evolving, moving within a fulcrum of turbo-charged energy. Settlers are historical, rooted, constantly re-interpreting the past to fit the present. Sacha is a fluid migrant. The central paradox of the indigenous lies in their concept of land. Land for the indigenous mind is immanent, ever-changing, delicate, prism and oracle, the entry to the innermost secrets of the gods.
Musically speaking, migrants are the “release” and settlers are the “tension” of our world, and when they remain balanced, one serves as the counterpoint for the other. I understand the conflict, being a vagabond born into a world where justice reigned as the supreme value. The oak panelling, the ritual of the courtroom, the red oak of the judge’s bench, the hand-carved back walls, the witness stands, jury boxes, barristers’ tables, lecterns all underline the gravitas of justice. Inspiring respect, even awe for the millennial genius of the Common law. But when lawyers have become turgid, sententious, pontifical and alas, greedy fools, when they renege on their duties towards the less privileged, the law becomes fossilized and abandons natural justice for the perks of privilege. Canada, my country also reflected this contrapuntal dilemma. The “natural governing party” had enjoyed the trappings of a political form of virtue-signalling, but beneath that, the graybeards knew that the ticket for success of the country depended upon stability, the precondition for a raw-resource based economy.
However, that was not the way things worked in this fluid, ill-contoured and constantly evolving world that I had just entered. After reading “Chains of Title,” Himko Kaps Kap introduced me to a judge in the midst of the turbulent modern Indian wars of the Columbia River basin — Judge Ted Strong of the Yakama Tribal Court in Idaho. And it was Judge Strong who introduced me to Sacha, and in turn to the great Ariki, the indigenous Pope. The Yakama are another warrior nation who live in the Columbia River basis. They rode with the Cayuse, and they hunted buffalo together. They fought alongside Sitting Bull. Himko Kaps Kap drove out to the Tribal Court of Judge Ted Strong and waited for him to emerge from his chambers, and then laid out our plan. Exposed the bare-faced treachery of the Borgias and how, upon the return of Columbus from America, Pope Alexander VI, wrongful usurper of the title of Vicar of Christ, proclaimed a Papal Bull, Inter Caetera, that would form the legal basis for the conquest and spoliation of the Americas. Judge Strong listened to Himko Kaps Kap, and then responded:
“This not just an idea. This is a world-changing idea.”
Himko Kaps Kap later related this to me. Judge Strong had only one legal question: What is your view on laches — the doctrine that a case must be brought within a reasonable delay — an objection I thought rebutted by the fact that the offence was ongoing, and of the nature of a crime against humanity. Furthermore, the doctrine had been built into US law and had been applied as recently as 2005 in a trilogy of New York cases involving Oneida nation.
One of the greatest threats to the entire Long March to Rome was the strength of its theoretical underpinnings. The only defence offered up by the Vatican was “ancient history” and the sole defence of the US Courts was the flimsiest of notions that by purely stating that indigenous peoples were sub-humans, you could steal their land and confine them to enclaves. But, our wish to limit the scope of the mission to exposing the “manufactured inequality” that had led to the genocidal suffering of the indigenous was naïve in the extreme. Juris de jure evidence of this global treachery was unsustainable as a basis for reconciliation. Every sliver of truth merely whetted the appetite of the heirs of this ecclesiastical knavery, and with each passing day, the Moccasin telegraph reverberated with a plethora of voices seeking restoration of everything that had been pillaged, and nowhere more so than in the land of freedom. What the American tribes wanted was nothing less than melting down the gold of the Vatican.