Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [225]
As he lay dying from wounds suffered fighting the whites, Tecumseh’s father Pucksinwah made his son Chiksika promise that neither he nor Tecumseh would ever make peace with the whites. His last words were, “They only wish to devour us.”450
What would happen if we were to fully internalize his last words? What would happen if we were to abide by this same promise he extracted from his sons?
Notice that I said the arguments in the Derrick Jensen discussion group were somewhat similar to those I imagine have been held by countless of the indigenous. There are several significant differences.
The first of course is that the conversations among the indigenous took (and take) place within functioning communities of the uncivilized, that is, people who are free, that is, people who are not slaves. There is a world of difference between free men and women—free creatures of any sort—deciding whether to fight to defend their freedom, whether to fight to not be forced into slavery; and slaves deciding whether to fight to gain a freedom they’ve never known at all. The latter are less likely to fight, because their default, their experience, the state by which all others will be judged, is that of submission. They breathe it in from childhood, and drink it in their mother’s milk, consume it at the table, and learn it from their fathers. Gaining freedom in this case requires a long and arduous series of conscious and willful acts, many of which will be opposed not only by their owners but perhaps more effectively by all of their training as slaves, by the myriad ways they’ve internalized the needs and desires (and psychoses) of their owners, and more effectively still by all of the ways they’ve come to accept the status quo, the default, the existence of the system of slavery as anything other than what it is: a system of slavery.
Far less likely to fight back even than slaves are those so deeply and thoroughly enslaved that they no longer perceive their own slavery. This is what we today would call normal. As Frank Garvey wrote, “In this country people are rarely imprisoned for their ideas because they’re already imprisoned by their ideas. The wage-slaves of today aren’t ripe for revolt because they don’t know that they’re slaves and no more free than the slaves of yore, despite the fact that they think so. . . . You can’t get rid of slave culture until the slaves know that they are slaves, and are proud of the historical responsibility it gives them to be the agent of social change.”451
It’s not too much to say that most of us have essentially no understanding of what it would be like to live free. A few years ago I interviewed Vine Deloria, American Indian author of such books as God Is Red, Custer Died For Your Sins, and Red Earth, White Lies. He commented that we all—and most especially American Indians—are now living at a very hazardous time, because most of the current Indian elders “probably reached adulthood in the 1930s. This means their grandfathers were the guys who fought Custer and Miles, and who in the ’30s were sitting on their reservations getting ready to die. Those people had been brought up in freedom. They had not had reservation experiences in their early years. We’re now losing the last people who ever spoke to the last people who were free.”452
Black Hawk’s fears have come true: “They poisoned us by their touch. We were not safe. We lived in danger. We were becoming like them, hypocrites and liars, adulterers, lazy drones, all talkers, and no workers.”
If many Indians have become civilized, how much tighter, then, are civilization’s chains on those of us who are further