A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [178]
I would not be who I am without your guidance and love.
Notes on Sources
None of the information in this book is in any way arcane, or even difficult to find. Many fine researchers have compiled thorough and often devastating histories and analyses of our culture's horrible trajectory and have articulated viable alternatives. I am thankful that these other authors were able to point me toward original sources. I include here the primary sources where I can, otherwise, the secondary sources.
Silencing
The epigraph (and all other R.D. Laing quotes) is from R.D. Laing's extraordinary book The Politics of Experience. This book, along with Neil Evernden's The Natural Alien, helped me perhaps more than any others to understand the alienation that characterizes our culture, and to understand also that it is possible to experience the world—to not be alienated.
For the description of a factory slaughterhouse I unfortunately had to rely on a composite of friends' descriptions and published accounts. My attempts to enter slaughterhouses were met with polite yet insistent refusals. The public relations hacks with whom I spoke «&/provide me lots of nifty literature, none of which mentions death or killing.
My figure for rates of rape within our culture come from Judith Hermans classic Trauma and Recovery, and Diane E. H. Russel's Sexual Exploitation, Rape, Child Sexual Abuse, and Sexual Harassment.
"I suppose, then . . ." is from Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy.
"Let the woman ..." is from First Timothy.
My source for many of the quotes concerning the European hatred of indigenous Africans is Noel Mostert's comprehensive Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa's Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People. He pointed me toward many informative primary documents.
"extremely ugly..." is from Raven-Hart's Cape of Good Hope, citing Leguat's 1708 New Voyage to the East
"when they speak . . ." is also from Cape of Good Hope, this time citing Baptiste Tavemier.
"it is a great pittie ..." is from Raven-Hart's Before Van Riebeeck.
I have two sources for many of my quotes concerning the European hatred of indigenous North Americans. The first is David Stannard's
American Holocaust. The second is Frederick Turner's Beyond Geography. Both are invaluable references to the primary documents, both provide wonderful analyses, and both are extremely difficult to read because of the atrocities they detail.
"animals who do . . ." and "were born for ..." is from Stannard.
The quote about scientists administering beatings is from When Elephants Weep, by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy.
I became aware of the study by Allport, Bruner, and Jandorf through an article someone handed to me at a reading, entitled "The Psychology of Smog," by Ira J. Winn, from The Nation, March 5, 1973.
The figure of one hundred and fifty million enslaved children comes from cross-referencing two sources, and then being extremely conservative in my extrapolation. The Anti-Slavery Society finds more than one hundred million enslaved children just in Asia, and the International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour, which puts the estimate of enslaved children worldwide in "only" the tens of millions, finds that Africa has an incidence of child labor nearly twice that of Asia. The mere fact that I can even consider estimates differing by one hundred million (I think an estimate of two hundred and fifty million enslaved children worldwide would be defensible) disturbs me greatly. Lost in the numbers—in fact worse than lost, but masked—is the misery inherent in each one of these cases. This little girl enslaved to prostitution in Thailand, this little boy enslaved to rugmaking in Pakistan. My source for the Anti-Slavery Society figure was the Spokesman-Review, September 19, 1995.
Evernden's story about cutting the vocal cords is from The Natural Alien.
The Okanagan definition of "violation of a woman" is from Jeannette Armstrong.
Coyotes, Kittens, and Conversations