This is a fierce book, fiercely written,
with a truth telling that pierces the heart of the reader.
Its author, Wub-e-ke-niew is a man who has
dwelt in many worlds, Aboriginal, Euro-American, European, has worked
every job
and condition, known many realities, but is the committed citizen of
only one,
the Anishinabe Ojibway. He makes it
clear that he is neither an "Indian" nor a "Native
American," denigrating terms that are inventions of Euro-Americans, and
which replace with stereotypes the immense complexity and variation
among
indigenous cultures.
This man of vast human experience
and possessed of the deep spiritual ways of his culture is also a voice
crying
in the wilderness for the sovereignty of indigenous people. Raised in traditional Anishinabe Ojibway ways
by his loving grandfather, he was upon his death, placed in the
concentration
camp confines of a Catholic mission school, taught only a very limited
English,
beaten and derided for his culture and forbidden to speak his native
language. Joining the army he was sent
to Germany after the end of World War II as a member of the military
police. There, he studied the
ambiguities of European culture, and found them shocking.
As jack-of-all-trades and master of many he
has been farmer, fire fighter, electrician, truck driver, stevedore,
journalist, one of the founders of the American Indian Movement
(A.I.M), and
presently, the chairman of the Economic Development Committee for the
Red Lake
Peoples Council. But always he has been
and continues to be the careful and conscientious researcher into the
terrible
facts of what has been done to the aboriginal indigenous people of the
Americas. He offers us in painful and
painstaking detail, the strategies for genocide that have been laid
upon his people
over the centuries. For there is not
question but that Aboriginal history after the coming of the Europeans
is a
saga of horror. In the case of North
America, no payment made for lands and rights, a sham of treaties, few
kindnesses given for many kindnesses received, only disease, war,
racism and
the desire to see the original people of this country totally
extinguished. Certainly there have been
humane exceptions to the litany of our cruelty to the native
populations, but
they are dwarfed by the harsh realities of conquest and genocide, the
refusal
of sovereignty and the betrayal of treaties, policies that remained
part of our
official stance for too long. Perhaps
the wrongs we have inflected are so stunning that we literally are
incapable of
taking them in, and so we shut them out and make ourselves blind and
deaf to
the consequences of our prejudices in action.
Or we declare often enough to persuade ourselves that it is
true, that
we were really bringing the great gift of civilization to the
"uncivilized."
Yet we of the "civilized"
West have brought the world to the edge of ecological disaster, and to
the
demeaning of spirit and people of spirit in favor of economic expansion
and
material success. We have declared war
on the Earth for the sake of fleeting pleasures and compromised our
very souls
in the savagery of that pursuit.
Wub-e-ke-niew holds up the mirror to Euro-American society and
finds it
wanting: the cold abstractions of its hierarchical language, its
religion based
on the beating and bloodshed of its "savior", its reality riddled
with "masochistic mind games...fraught with paradox".
"We Have the Right to
Exist" was as difficult a book to write as it is painful and necessary
for
us to read. The author says, "I
have lived under the oppression and genocidal tactics of which I write,
and
writing about what has happened re-opens the old wounds.
I see the Anishinabe Ojibway whom I knew as
a child. I can hear their voices again,
these, my people, who died along with their whole families, for the
White man's
greed. Both myself and my children have
been attacked, physically beaten by the Euro-Americans, for no reason
other
than that we are Anishinabe Ojibway. I
do not want to dwell on the pain of the past, but it is necessary that
it be addressed,
because it is an inherent part of the larger structure of Western
European
Civilization and it must be dealt with openly.
The past and the present must be addressed honestly and fully in
order
to build a decent future for everybody."
This decent future may depend upon
our willingness to learn humbly what the aboriginal indigenous people
can teach
us about relating to each other and our earth.
These people hold a knowing that invites true reason and yet
exceeds all
rational discourse and can access the great connection between mind and
nature
that brings us home to our true place in the order of things. The Anishinabe Ojibway at Red Lake in
Northern Minnesota are themselves a sovereign nation, one of the last
of the
aboriginal indigenous people to still live on land that they have
dwelled on
for millennia. They are one of two
Reservations in the United States not to have been divided up and
allotted in
parcels. An egalitarian and not violent
people with a profound sense of the great circle of life, with a
language and
spirituality, as rich as any every known, they have always practiced
ecology
with the earth and partnership between men and women, have always known
the
true meaning of tolerance and valued each persons contribution to the
life of
the whole. The depth and beauty of this
culture shines forth from these pages and offers true contrast to the
life that
so many of us have been forced to live.
This book in its scholarship and its passion is one of the most powerful indictments ever written about the treatment of aboriginal indigenous people, both here and abroad. But it is also a call to a new fairness and equity between peoples, one that can restore autonomy to those cultures upon which our continued life on this planet may depend.
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