What White Americans Could Think About With Standing Rock
We have been ill for days. At last Bruce turned on Ken Burns’ The West. This show was made in the 90s. I had not seen it before. I imagine it made a lot of people angry.
I wept. I am still weeping.
Natan Tokahe, or Chief White Hat, Albert White Hat, Sr., provided the message that I will assist in sharing.
If you are a white person who responded to Bernie Sanders’ message: if you knew instinctively he was right and that ordinary people were being exploited and our country was on the wrong track with constant war — and that Medicare for all and a free college education were important and necessary —
Perhaps you will understand what Albert White Hat, best known to most Americans as the Lakota man who translated Dances With Wolves, is saying.
I would wager that no more than 2–3% of white Americans would understand what I’m saying. Not just Americans. I saw the rich, famous British author JK Rowling say “the scariest thing” she ever saw was a recent press conference with US President Donald Trump. In comments on Albert’s video, a Serbian man says “poor Indians, so lucky we don’t have that here.” He doesn’t even see the same thing has been done in his country for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. It makes him feel better to think white Americans are more wicked than Serbians.
As to me, we’ve always seen the moon and the star. Me and my people. I was told this as a child by my grandmother. The moon and star appeared on the night my grandfather asked my grandmother to marry him. It appeared on the night Bruce and I met.
For the past two weeks I’ve been telling people about the very bright evening star. Most had not noticed it. The few who had, thought little of it. Many looked at me as if I was insane for even mentioning Venus was so bright and this was the bright star in the evening sky — for a time so close to the crescent moon.
Last week we had a teacher training and I sat at a table with, aside from my friend — 6 others. Of the six, two had living souls and hearts. Four had ones that were small or very sick. One’s hard little eyes only lit when money or her own name was mentioned.
So, Albert White Hat said he had grown up listening to the stories of elders, and only at 16 did he go to “Indian School,” the military academy style schools meant to destroy Native culture. He was educated to hate his Lakota heritage and be ashamed of himself. What he describes above is how he felt when he realized what had happened to him and to his people.
I know this feeling to myself. It still happens to me. I choose now to love myself. I choose to understand that those who mock and denigrate me and mine do so because they are small, sick and weak. They are not strong, wise and healthy like Albert White Hat.
Often, I hear “All white people …”
So this article is addressed to other white people. Do you feel ashamed and feel in your heart this is wrong when you hear yourself lumped in with others and denigrated? All white people did NOT put Lakota children in those schools. They did not create that system to destroy their heritage. They did not break the countless treaties, they did not drive Native people from their homes countless times, they did not slaughter at Wounded Knee, Sand Creek or Bear River.
In addition, in school, you had the exact same type of education as was forced on Albert White Hat. As one example, here is a parable. It is about our high school assistant coach, who served as a part-time counselor.
He told my friend, a young Chicana woman whose family had lived in our town about the same amount of time as mine had, to be happy with her high school diploma and look to get married. He told my best friend to go to the local community college and get a job as a secretary. He told me that since I’d gotten college scholarship offers, to pick one where I’d have the greatest chance of meeting a rich young man to marry. Years later, he was a board member of the organization where I was hired to work with homeless and very poor people. I can’t even remember what I said or did to anger him, but he stormed in my office one day, slammed his hand on my desk so hard it broke the glass, and threatened to get me fired if I didn’t obey him. As an adult, I heard the rumors like everyone else. He was thought to have molested many young boys in the junior football league he coached and even at the high school.
So, no, most white people. You didn’t do all those bad things to the Indians. Your leaders, people you trusted like the town and school trusted this guy, did.
And as Albert says, it is not a thing of the past. It is a living thing. It is now, and it is for time to come that we can see and feel.
Here’s the thing. Probably those people who gave me the stink eye when I pointed out Venus in the evening sky were embarrassed they didn’t recognize such a well-known planet. They probably thought why do I rush along so, with my eyes to the ground or on money or what I’ll buy next? They disliked being jarred out of their fantasy of competence and control.
Most people like me don’t make it to my age. I understand exactly what Albert White Hat said. We must choose a path of healing for ourselves. Otherwise living with the dead hearts and the hurt they do is too painful and the inability to stop it so shameful, it’s easy to choose the ways Albert described: dying out on a road somewhere, drunk or a gun to your head.
It was another author, N. Scott Momaday, who described early one morning, going to the site of the Sand Creek massacre and hearing the babies crying. As he spoke, I heard them. I hear them now.
And he spoke of the buffalo.
So no, not every white person has no heart or soul, feels nothing for the land, hears no spirits, and lives in an isolated, cold shell, lying to themselves even more than to those they cheat and demean and betray.
Our medicine and various technologies have both hurt and helped us, I think. In the past, those of us who can hear and feel these things didn’t last long unless we put our gifts in service of evil.
Now we have to put them to service of good. So, white people, most of you have a general sense that countless US Army generals and Colonels and Indian Affairs agents and Congressmen and Senators negotiated with Native Americans, made treaties and promises and broke every single one of them and it — #NoDAPL — continues to the present day. Based in this, it is easy to see how Native Americans would think all white Americans are liars, killers and thieves without honor whose word is worth nothing. This country was founded on “freedom of religion” but this did not extend to Native peoples. They were not considered citizens and any true story of these massacres shows the people who slaughtered them thought the same of them as Nazis thought of Jews and Russians and Slavs and gays and developmentally disabled people.
What you do not understand is, unless you are Chuck Schumer’s niece, or Joe Manchin’s daughter, or Bill Clinton’s daughter, or Warren Buffett or Bill Gates, or Ivanka Trump, or any other of the .0001%, is that the powers that be, right now this minute, think of you, white American, exactly the same way as those Colonels, Generals, Indian Affairs men, and George Armstrong Custer thought of the Indians. The way the “Friends of the Indians” thought of them. Those are the smart rich white dead soul people who thought up the schools to kill the Indian culture. They are like Nancy Pelosi, who told people that Food Stamps are good because they let more people do artwork and spend time with their families. She left out the part they need Food Stamps since they can’t get a job that pays a living wage, and by the way she doesn’t give a rat’s ass since she knows she’s permanently elected and no one could ever “fire” her.
After the buffalo hunters killed all the buffalo by standing on the back of trains and shooting them until their guns overheated, occasionally foods were delivered to starving Indians forced onto reservations. The Agents always took their cut first. Too bad if there wasn’t enough for the little kids after that.
People keep talking about reforming the Democratic Party. Or how bad Trump is. They will insult others who disagree instantly. If they had weapons and means, certainly they would shoot or turn those of us who think the Party is un-reformable, and Trump is the same as all the rest of the Presidents, as if we were terrifying Ghost Dancers.
I was amazed by watching this film to hear the story of Sitting Bull’s visions, visions that all came true. I hadn’t known of these things. Our schools do not teach us. Even if they do, they do not show them to educate, they show them so people will feel bad and not question further. Heaven help they should hear Sitting Bull’s wisdom. Why do people think even the best of our white man schools are any different than the Indian schools that Albert White Hat was forced to attend?
As a teacher, I wonder, why don’t people ask WHY our schools are so bad and prepare people only for mindless work or to consume products that are forced on them?
I was not surprised to learn that when Sitting Bull toured with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show for four months and received good pay, he gave most of it to homeless people and anyone who would ask. He wondered upon going to big cities like New York, why were there homeless people when there was so much wealth?
That was in 1885.
In 1890, Sitting Bull was shot dead while being taken into custody in his home in a place about 80% of Americans still haven’t heard of: Standing Rock. He had a vision that his own people would do it, and he was right.
The world needs people like Sitting Bull, like most of the Lakota, like most of the other First Nations. They see the moon and the star and they hear the land. When they walk upon the ground of a place like Sand Creek, they hear the babies crying.
I see more like me in my classroom each year. But oh, we suffer so. We have always suffered. This is what the opioids are about, what crack was about, what alcohol and meth are about: do you see, feel or hear things that hurt so bad you have to blot them out? The dead eye dead soul people don’t: but they know you do. There’s a solution: NARCAN.
They’re not even trying to pretend to “help” any longer. They just want to collect the insurance premiums for your extended, miserable life.
In practical terms, white Democrats, this man Tom Perez is a “White Hispanic.” He is like one of the Indian Agents and not one of the better ones. He will be worse for actual Hispanic people than a white non-Hispanic.
In practical terms, compare how working class and middle class, any ordinary white family, has been treated by the Democratic and Republican parties over the past … forever. Absolutely forever. Do you not see that you are now the Lakota, and you were only allowed by these people to take Lakota land before, to kill the buffalo, because you served them? They only let you take the land of Californios because they wanted to exploit it for gold and oil. Not for you. For them. They paid for the schools like Stanford just as they paid for the Indian Schools like the Sherman Indian Institute, the setting of my first published science fiction story, “Jonny Punkinhead”. They only educate people enough to serve or be soldiers. They dream of an army of compliant killer robots. They dream of an army of sex robots so they will not need wives.
If you failed to do so, or worse, rebelled, like Bernie Sanders, like Sitting Bull, like Chief Joseph / Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt then you will see the true nature of those you have trusted.
I am not writing this to exploit Native people. I am writing this because like those I heard in the film, I hear the babies crying. I hear them right now. I weep for them right now.
I have had a dream of people going to the stars and stopping killing.
I have had a dream of billions of people dying cold and alone with no food.
I have had a dream of animals saving our lives.
Which is true?
People I was raised with. People who call themselves powerful. Why are there homeless people in the streets when there is so much wealth? It isn’t because they didn’t work hard enough. It’s because you have small, sick, weak hearts and souls. You cannot feel the wind between your fingers, or see even the brightest, most beautiful star in the sky. You think what is in your small weak shell is more important than all of earth, all of the universe. You do not hear the buffalo …
I can’t write it. It hurts more than the babies.
Can you not feel the animals coming back? Perhaps it is they who will inherit the earth. I hope so.
