A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [23]
And then we would pass on, back to our lives, back to watching our televisions, back to listening to our music, back to this book, and we would say, "I did not do this. This was not my doing."
I throw the dart again, again, again. Each time a thousand horrors. Each time enslavement, rape, murder, genocide. The dart strikes Africa, where somewhere between thirty and sixty million people (who, according to those responsible were "bestial and sordid," and "the very reverse of human kind," and who would each have otherwise "idly spent the years of a useless, restive life") died after having been captured for the slave trade. Another twelve to fifteen million survived to spend the rest of their lives working the plantations and mines of the New World. The dart strikes New Zealand, where "taking all things into consideration, the disappearance of the race is scarcely subject for much regret. They are dying out in a quick, easy way, and are being supplanted by a superior race." The dart strikes Hawai'i, where a missionary stated that a ninety percent reduction in the population was like "the amputation of diseased members of the body."
The dart strikes my home. I live about a mile from Hangman Valley, near Spokane, Washington, and thrice that far from Fort George Wright Drive, one of the city's arteries. Prior to Colonel Wright's tenure in this city, Hangman Valley and the creek that runs through it were known as Latah, which means in the native tongue stream where little fish are caught. At the time, 1858, whites had not been able to bring all of the region's Indians to terms. Then Wright had an idea. Under a flag of truce he called the Yakama warrior Qualchan and his wife to Wright's residence, telling them he was going to proffer a peace treaty. Having already put Qualchan's father in chains, Wright arrested Qualchan, led him directly to a tree and with Qualchan's wife as witness hanged him. As Wright noted in his report to headquarters: "Qual-chew came to me at 9 o'clock this morning, and at 9 1/4 a.m. he was hung." The next day Wright similarly hanged six Palouse Indians. He was a hero.
Four years ago a group of students tried to change the name of Fort George Wright Drive to Qualchan. The citizens of Spokane, those who cared at all, were outraged, and a political cartoonist—my next-door neighbor—drew a cartoon with two frames. On the right, a bunch of hippies with cigarettes and beads, captioned "Wrong." On the left, a drawing of the Colonel, captioned "Wright." The road, which I drive often, remains named in his honor.
I had a fairly hard time of it in school. It's not that my grades weren't good, for they were. Instead it's that the questions I cared about often seemed at odds with what I was being taught. When my teachers told me how, I wanted to know why, and when they gave me abstractions, I asked them to make the lessons real. Not that how isn't important, but I sensed even as a child—in a vague, entirely unarticulated fashion—that to ask how without asking why might be dangerous: only recently have I grown to name my earlier misgivings, and to know that such an imbalance causes nuclear bombs, nerve gas, napalm, and other examples of inexcusable technology. When teachers tired of my questions, which were for obvious reasons often childish, I would be sent to a room by myself with a book. I was supposed to learn the next year's math. But I taught myself snatches of whatever caught my fancy—one month it was a little Latin, another it was Egyptian Hieroglyphics 101, but often it was my favorite invented game; pitching erasers across the room onto bookshelves or into trash cans (bank shots: double score).
In junior high, I nearly failed Algebra on philosophical grounds. I was told, for example, that the quantity x minus y squared equals x squared minus 2xy plus y squared. Because the two sides are equal, I asked, why should I waste my time working with