The Euro-Americans have been hiding
the truth about history from generation to generation, hoping that the
Aboriginal Indigenous people would be absorbed into the Métis
community under
the ersatz identity of Indian, or disappear into extinction like the
Indigenous
Tasmanians of another English colony; like so many of the Aboriginal
Indigenous
peoples and Nations of this Continent who have vanished from
Euro-American
time.
In Western European linear time, the
past vanishes into obscurity, perceived as dimensionless and infinitely
small
at the vanishing point of linear perspective. Their
history becomes what they describe as the dead past,
hypothetical and in a sense perennially unknowable, inaccessible in the
abstract. The Western Europeans become
detached from their continuity in time, and thus seemingly
insulated
from their history, encapsulated in a present reality which has been
severed at
its roots. The elaborate centralized
revision of history described by George Orwell in his book Nineteen
Eighty-Four[i]
is
unnecessary, a metaphorical example of the Western Europeans' extant
relationship
to time. The elderly and the
young are polarized, and communication across time has been
broken for
all but the artificial aristocracy who define history as only their
own, and
claim time in terms like the month of Julius Caesar, Year of
Our Lord,
A.D. Euro-American culture has been
manipulated by corporate advertisers in the media to idolize youth, so
that the
people molded as consumers become convinced that the young know more
than their
elders. Their oral history is
discarded, and the peerage at the top turns to a new page in the
history of
their relationship with those they subordinate every generation,
maintaining a
socialistic Utopia in the First Estate, and exploiting the resources
and the time
of everyone else within their hierarchical domain.
In Ahnishinahbæótjibway
time, the circle always comes around, and the past is never gone. This is the nature of our history and our time,
and no matter how long the European peoples remain on this Continent,
they
cannot hide from the truth and the lies of their own history in the
annals of
linear, academic time. They cannot run
away from the consequences of their past, because it is inextricably
part of
their present time. Even if they
run away to outer space, as they dream to do in so much of their
science and
fiction, they cannot hide--they always carry with them the legacy of time.
Ahnishinahbæótjibway time
is
perennial and unending, harmonized with the cycles of the seasons,
flowing as
an inseparable part of reality. Ahnishinahbæótjibway
time is intrinsically life and death, Grandmother Earth,
Grandfather Midé. Western
European time is fragmented,
splintered into mechanically defined seconds and minutes and hours,
boxed into
externally imposed segmented days on a blank calendar, defined without
dimension or texture. It is an
artificial, abstract construct. Western
European time has a beginning--the Biblical Creation and the Big Bang
are
metaphysically and structurally equivalent--and therefore logically has
an end.
I have spent a time studying
the White man, and have heard him use the motto, "Eat, Drink, and Be
Merry, for tomorrow we may die."
(I have heard Indian alcoholics say the same thing, "I might as
well drink, they have the atomic bomb.")
From an Ahnishinahbæótjibway
perspective, this is a
very strange thing to say, a morbid declaration of complete
powerlessness and
utter lack of hope, a pathological symptom of linear time and Western
European
languages. Judeo-Christianity's
underlying thanatolatristic philosophy, their assertion which has
endured for a
millennium that "The World Will End," their comic-strip archetype
fakirs carrying "The End is Coming" signs, enables brutal hierarchy
to exist by warping time, and deludes their subject peoples
into both a
terrible hopelessness and sense of futility.
By sticking their heads into the
sands of their history to hide from the consequences of their past,
Western
European culture has lost the meaning of both life and death, which are
part of
the same harmonious totality. Since the
Greeks consigned their ancestors to Hades, the Western Europeans have
been lost
souls. The Judeo-Christian's world may
end along with the Indian world, but the time has come to
debunk their
paradox, and their lethal self-fulfilling prophecies including the
Indian
Religions' reflections of Judeo-Christianity.
There will be changes--the Western Europeans have come full
circle and
have met the beginning and thus the end of their paradigm of exploitive
expansion, but the reality expressed in Ahnishinahbæótjibway
philosophy will endure.
The Lislakhs' future time has
been stolen from them to balance the denial of their past time,
so they
don't plan for their children or grandchildren. They
leave huge deficits, ecological disasters, and plundered
resources for the next generations.
They justify their irresponsibility in time with the
disempowerment of their hierarchy: they never know when they will be
conscripted to go fight in another war--they can't refuse, because
their
citizenship can be taken away, and they will be thrown in prison. The Western Europeans' myth-spinners are
still depending on the "next frontier," and there are no more
frontiers. They have reached the end of
their expansion, and have replaced reality with mirage.
A Métis friend of mine told me about
his brief job as an interpreter during World War I.
He needed to ask an Ahnishinahbæótjibway
their
date of birth, a requirement of European time in filling out
U.S.
Government military conscription forms.
"When were you born," he asked. "The
year [the town of] Thief River was founded." "What
month," he asked. "When the corn was so
high,"
meaning the month of July. My friend
said he wondered, "how the hell can I write that," it's two different
times, two different ways of relating to the world.
So, he figured it was time to quit,
rather than trying to interpret time.
He could have translated this simple part of time, but
it would
have taken too much red tape, so that was the end of his short time
as
an interpreter.
The Indians always talk about Indian
time, which is a part of Western European Indian mythology, patterned
by their
masters on European time, and has nothing to do with Aboriginal
Indigenous
peoples' time. Indian time is a
mirror image of European time, an excuse for filling out the European
projections of Indians being lazy and late.
Indians pat themselves on the back and call Indian time "the
Grand
Entrance," but to the White man it's watching subject people grinnin'
and
shufflin' in a demeaning role. The
people who say they live in Indian time have relinquished their own time. The White man has tricked the Indians into
filling out White stereotypes in the White man's time, and
unwittingly
supporting the White man's self-image that he's more intelligent and
morally
superior.
Addicted Indians are trapped in
Euro-American identities like "Drunken Indian." They
deal with alcohol and drugs in terms of
Indian time, hours and minutes just the same as the Europeans. Indians talk about going on a three-day
drunk, and how long their hangover will last in linear time. When their drug hit runs down, then it is
time for another fix. That is Indian
time, which is the same kind of time as their White fathers'. The Indians only walk in one world, and that
one is within the lower echelons of the White man's world of Western
European
time.
The White man says "time is
money," and ascribes value to time in the context of his social class
system: so many dollars an hour for wage-labor, so many dollars a year
in
salaries and compound interest. Money
and time are a part of the same thing.
A person is paid for their time--they are not on their own time. Ahnishinahbæótjibway
time
is a part of the fabric of reality, and cannot be bought or sold. This is part of the difference between
Western European time and Ahnishinahbæótjibway
time. One of the reasons
Euro-American immigrants
have destroyed our ecosystem is to control us through their economic
system,
bought and paid for with our stolen property, in quantified monetary
time.
The United States Government
promotes Indians, rather than face the consequences of their genocide
of the
Aboriginal Indigenous people here and in time.
They have the illusion that by obscuring their past, by focusing
on and promoting the good/bad dichotomy of Indian stereotypes, they can
buy time. Most of the Indians have
no idea of the ways
in which they are being manipulated (although a few of them do).
Aboriginal Indigenous time
has absolutely nothing to do with hours and minutes.
We are on our own land, and our time is ancient and
inseparable from our land. The meaning
of the Midé title of my great-grandfather, Bah-se-nos,
is in part in
honor of time, the four seasons and the four directions. In European time, he has been dead for more
than ninety years, and is therefore gone, forgotten.
In Ahnishinahbæótjibway
time,
Bah-se-nos is present and real, along with the phases of the moon, the
intricate harmony of the time of the flowering and fruiting of
each
plant, the fledging of birds and the metamorphosis of insects, the time
of making sugar, the time of dreams, the time of
harvesting mahnomen.
The Minnesota Department of Natural
Resources tries to regulate Grandmother Earth according to European
time. They try to play their own God, and
pass
regulations mandating when mahnomen will be ripe, and can be
harvested
by fee-payment to the State, under State license. Their
regulations have nothing to do with the ripeness of mahnomen.
Western European scientists think
that they can manage the forests by brute force, applying insecticides
and
herbicides that will kill everything in time.
Everything in nature has a place, exterminating one species
destroys the harmony, and other species become extinct in a chain
reaction. The bugs, the mosquitoes, the
wood-ticks are all part of Grandmother Earth, they have a place here
and they
have a place in our religion.
Grandfather Midé, and Grandmother Earth: that is
who we, the Ahnishinahbæótjibway
are. Mother Nature comes out in the
Spring of the year, gives birth to all of the young.
The trees flower, the birds hatch, the deer and the bears and
all
of the other animals have their little ones.
The mosquitoes come out, and then the mosquito-hawks and the
birds and
the bats eat the mosquitoes. When you
spray DDT or any other insecticide, you unbalance everything. Everything is walking around in the woods
sick; there is no fruit because there aren't any insects to pollinate
the
flowers.
Ahnishinahbæótjibway and
other
Aboriginal Indigenous peoples' resources have been used to build the
structure
of Euro-American society. It is our
resources which have been stolen to "make American great," and it is
our resources which have been changed into a foreign currency; and then
that alien
money system has been used to oppress us, destroy our community and our
forest-based permacultural food supply, control our time and
lock us
into poverty. We had immense wealth,
spiritual together with material, in our forests and in our land. Everything was kept in harmony, abundant and
beautiful.
In my great-grandfather's time,
old-growth forests covered more than half of this Continent, from the
Atlantic
Ocean to the tallgrass prairies west of the Mississippi.
The trees rose to meet the skies, and the
sentience of these ancient living beings was a part of our Ahnishinahbæótjibway
community, part of the seamless continuity of time. They were more magnificent than the finest
of the Europeans' cathedrals, but they were not oppressively cold,
psychologically manipulative man-made canyons of stone; nor
flying-buttressed
edifices like hordes of giant locusts crouched in waiting to devour the
land
and suck the life out of Grandmother Earth.
Our forests were comfortable and nurturing, like the haven of
baby
chicks under their mother hen's wings.
The forests were home, serene and secure, gentle and wise. Theirs was a concert of voices: the sharp
snapping of trees in the cold winter nights, the wind in the pines, the
low
calls of mother foxes to their young, the soft conversation of our Dodemian
and the crackling of the fires in the sugarbushes, the spring symphony
of
birds, the drumsongs drifting across the water in summer, and the
whooshing
beat of the air as millions of birds flew south in the fall. When I was young, I walked through these
forests. The earth was soft underfoot,
like walking on a plush carpet. The
undisturbed primeval forests had very little underbrush, and a person
could see
a great distance.
When we were young boys playing in
the old-growth pine forests, we used to watch the flying squirrels in
the pines
in wonder and amazement. We watched
them glide from one tree to the next, walking behind them on a thick
carpet of
pine needles. They were beautiful,
graceful
animals. It's been more than forty
years since I have seen a flying squirrel.
They have joined the vanishing species that disappear with the
plunder
of the ecology. They are gone, because
their home in the ancient pines has been clear-cut, replaced by aspen,
and the
whole ecosystem has changed. There is
no habitat for flying squirrels in aspen brush. Where
are the smallest of the woodpeckers, that used to be all
over the woods when I was a boy? In the
last ten years, I have only seen three of these tiny birds. Where are the cedar swamps, so thick that it
was dark at noon? I used to go down
into these swamps and pick our swamp tea, and a few of the
moccasin-flowers. All of this is gone,
and not one White man raised his voice in protest when this entire
forest was
destroyed. It is only very recently
that a few of the Euro-Americans are waking up, and realizing that all
life on
Earth is connected. They are standing
up in public and speaking out in defense of the spotted owls, and the
kangaroo
rat, and all of the other beings that are an integral part of
Grandmother
Earth, that gives us all life. I
applaud these courageous people.
Most White men can not see into the
forests; they can only see the edge of them.
Along the highways and lakeshores in Northern Minnesota is a
Potemkin
forest: a strip of trees about six trees deep.
What the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources calls
"aesthetic
buffers" mask ravaged clear-cut land.
The old trees have been cut,
replaced with what are called tree farms, in which the ground is hard,
furrowed
with plow ridges, and choked with underbrush.
These pitiful tree plantations are diseased monocultural
plantings grown
in an overload of insecticides and herbicides; barren unbalanced
ecologies
where the wildlife starves or is poisoned.
They bear no resemblance to the forests which belong here.
The ecosystem in this area is in
serious trouble. The forest products
companies will not--and cannot--restore what they are looting and
ransacking. A few trees cut down, will
grow back in an intact forest, but forest ecosystems, once destroyed,
are not
renewable. "Fish flies" are
one example of our fine-tuned ecology.
Ask any old-timer about the clouds of fish flies, so thick they
looked
like smoke, that swirled and hummed every May.
I haven't seen a single fish fly in four or five years. They may be "pesky," but they are
a necessary part of the ecosystem, and provide food for the hatchling
fish at
the exact time that they need it.
When the Euro-Americans destroy the forests, they destroy
everything,
and ultimately themselves.
The beauty which our people kept for
thousands of generations has been
completely destroyed in my lifetime by the Euro-Americans and their
Indians. My children will never see
much of what was our peoples' beautiful, magnificent heritage, because
of the
greed of the Whites and their Indians.
Our water is polluted, our fish are cancerous and infested with
parasites, and the game has almost disappeared--because the
inter-connected
circles of life have been destroyed.
The children growing up now see aspen brush, and do not have any
understanding of what a real forest means.
They are a lost generation, and nobody is telling them that a
stand of
aspen, which the D.N.R. defines as "forest," is something entirely
different from the beautiful primeval forest which was once here. Once clear-cut, the old forests are gone,
and will require undisturbed centuries to regenerate.
You can plant tree farms to the
horizon, and you still do not replace even one of the trees that was
here. A healthy forest is much more than
trees,
and planting trees will not restore an ecosystem which has been
demolished. It is said that the
Europeans "can't see the forest for the trees." Don't
get me wrong--I'm certainly not
against planting trees--but no matter how many trees you plant or tree
farms
you make, no matter how much public pomp and circumstance, and no
matter how
many scientific foresters with Ph.D.s, a tree farm has very little
resemblance
to the harmonious, intricate, and balanced ecosystem of the Ahnishinahbæótjibway A
tree farm will not stop your lakes from drying up; it
will not provide what forests must provide in order for the lakes and
rivers to
be full of fish.
The scientists talk about forest
management, but for them the bottom line is G.N.P.
They do not seem to understand that even a free-market,
democratic economy cannot exist outside the reality of the ecosystem. Allow the clear-cutting to continue, and you
will see--you will feel the effects much closer to home than you expect.
Such heedless destruction is
sacrilegious to the Ahnishinahbæótjibway. The Midé
is beyond European time, encompassing our lives, everything
that we do
and think and dream. It is not a
one-hour-a-week religion, like Christianity, where a person goes to
Church on
Sunday morning, and then goes back to destroying the environment again. The Western Europeans have declared a war of
total annihilation on our religion, on Grandmother Earth, and on
Grandfather Midé,
and then they have the gall to say that we, the Ahnishinahbæótjibway who
have always been a non-violent people, are warlike.
From an objective perspective,
outside of the context of Western European traditions, there is no
substantive
difference between the Euro-Americans' Science and their religions. When I didn't understand English, I
thought
that the reason that neither one made any sense was because I couldn't
communicate. But, after learning their
language, what they are doing looks even worse. The
Euro-American policy of irreversible environmental
destruction is justified and supported by accredited scientists with
Ph.D.s. But, the scientists do not live
here, the stockholders of the resource corporations don't live here,
and they
don't care about the devastation and suffering that they leave in the
wake of
their greed.
White urban dwellers live embedded
in layer within layer of Lislakh linguistic and cultural artifacts,
often
completely disconnected from reality.
In the man-made context of the city, they have no basis for
personally
evaluating the truth or falsehood of scientific assertions, and many
uncritically accept ludicrous self-serving lies like Acting President
Ronald
Reagan's statement that "trees cause air pollution," or the U.S.
Department of Agriculture's underlying thesis that "mature forests are
bad." But, the woods are a part of
me, a part of my Midé religion, and I know the terrible
destruction that
has been done. The Chippewa Indians
have been used to sell the land and sell the woods, which is not their
identity, and which is not a part of their religion.
Some of the most destructive loggers are White Chippewa Indians,
including some of the Federally recognized Indian leaders.
The land and the forests are not theirs;
they don't know anything about Ahnishinahbæótjibway
customs
and values. They are Lislakh immigrants
acting out a stereotyped caricature.
The Indian leaders dress up in
feathers, and are used to conjure up a public image that Aboriginal
Indigenous
people are quaint and nobly defeated anachronisms, living in tepees. But, at night, these Indian leaders sleep in
nice motels, paid for by the United States Government or the
Christian's
churches. The White-appointed Indian
leaders tell the general public about how the people on the
Reservations are
hungry, and then they go to a fancy restaurant to eat steak. (Such selfishness is unspeakable in the
context of Ahnishinahbæótjibway
values.) There are hungry people on the
Reservations
and in the urban ghettos: both Indians who are caught in the web of the
Indian
identity and the few surviving Aboriginal Indigenous people, who are
blacklisted from anything more than a menial job by the Bureau of
Indian
Affairs, and who are the ones who are hardest hit by the 50-90%
unemployment
rates on most Reservations. But, what
the Indian leaders discuss over their steaks is rhetoric which only
entrenches
the problems.
