• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2275 0

we might not. Civilization, with its relentless drive for standardization and absolute need to destroy diversity, has made itself extremely vulnerable to certain forms of attack. Any diverse system will by definition have far fewer bottlenecks, and those it does have will be far less crucial: diversity creates alternatives and leads to adaptability. If for some reason the salmon failed to return one season, the Tolowa could have eaten the abundant elk and even more abundant crabs and even more abundant lamprey. Standardized systems, while superficially more efficient, by their very nature are more susceptible to bottlenecks, and the bottlenecks they do have are far more constraining. By now, if oil supplies get cut off, the people who live in this occupied Tolowa territory will starve to death: the salmon, elk, crabs, and lamprey are gone, along with the knowledge of how to feed ourselves.454 Further, a globally interdependent economy will, once again by definition, be subject to far more and greater bottlenecks. Remember all the fools it takes to cut down just one big tree. Break a link in this chain of fools (chain of supply), and the chainsaws will fall silent.

For all its fancy surveillance software and bunker buster bombs, for all the propaganda pumped continuously into our homes and into our hearts, for all the massive prison complexes waiting for when the propaganda systems fail, the whole system is, as we’ll explore in Volume II, far more vulnerable than it was at the time of Tecumseh, or than it has been at any time since its wretched beginnings. In its haste to control and destroy the world, civilization has handed us some very long levers, and pointed us toward some very well-placed and solid fulcrums. In case you are wondering, that’s a very good thing indeed.

I need to mention one more striking difference between arguments among the civilized and among the indigenous about whether to fight back. It’s an absolutely crucial difference: Only rarely do the indigenous argue on moral grounds against fighting back. Sometimes they’ll make moral arguments against fighting back in this or that case, because they feel the particular injuries they’re discussing do not merit a violent response, and some tribes are extremely pacifistic among themselves (and even sometimes among other tribes), but almost never do the indigenous attempt to argue that one should on moral grounds never fight back against someone—let’s be precise, kill someone—who is stealing your land and killing your people.

So far I’ve only found one clear example of an indigenous person counseling that one should never under any circumstances fight back. It’s an article written by a Cheyenne Chief named Lawrence Hart.455 Hart describes what he calls the Cheyenne Peace Tradition, the essence of which is, according to Hart, the following teaching: “If you see your mother, wife, or children being molested or harmed by anyone, you do not go and seek revenge. Go, sit and smoke and do nothing, for you are now a Cheyenne chief.” To make sure we get his point, he repeats this word-for-word (and bolded) seven times in less than four pages. He also describes the actions of three Cheyenne he suggests we should all strive to emulate. The first of these was Lean Bear, who went to Washington, D.C., to meet with Abraham Lincoln. For this he was given a “peace medal,” and documents that “would show that he was a friendly, that he had made a treaty with the United States. A peace treaty, if you will.” Soon after he got home, he was out riding with some other Cheyenne and came upon a column of soldiers. He approached them. The soldiers shot him. He died clutching the documents showing he was a friendly. The second person we are supposed to emulate was White Antelope, who also had gone to D.C., and who also had received a peace medal. Lawrence Hart doesn’t mention whether White Antelope was holding this medal on the morning of November 29, 1864, as Colonel Chivington’s troops began the Sand Creek Massacre. White Antelope shouted in English at the white troops, “Stop! Stop!