by Lowell Bliss
Mother Earth will retaliate, the whole environment will retaliate, and the abusers will be eliminated. Things come full circle, back to where they started. That’s revolution. And that’s a prophecy of my people, of the Hopi people and of other correct peoples.
--Russell Means, Oglala Lakota
Upon his death in 2012 at age 72, Mother Jones magazine reissued a speech given by Russell Means, and described the Oglala Lakota activist as “perhaps the most outsized personality in the American Indian Movement, beginning with the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee.” My generation likely remembers Means more from his role as Chingachgook (the father) in the 1992 film, Last of the Mohicans.
I happened upon Means’ speech as it was reprinted in the appendix of his autobiography Where White Man Fear to Tread. Hmm, where white men fear to tread? This white man was up for the challenge of Means’ 554-page life story, but I kept wondering where the fear was. If I had been a Rapid City racist, I would certainly be afraid to meet Means in a bar room. If I had been an FBI agent, I’d be afraid to meet him peering out of a bunker at Wounded Knee. If I had been a bureaucrat, I’d be afraid to debate him about the good intentions of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. If I had been on the organizing committee of Denver’s Columbus Day parade, I’d be afraid to see him marching toward my float.
No, in the end this white man’s fear is reserved for the appendix of Means’ book, for the speech entitled “For America to Live, Europe Must Die,” which includes the statements that “It is only a matter of time until what Europeans call ‘a major catastrophe of global proportions’ will occur,” and “And when the catastrophe is over, we American Indian peoples will still be here to inhabit the hemisphere,” whereas the white man will apparently not.
Means describes the setting for the speech:
In 1980, [the Black Hills Alliance] sponsored the International Gathering for Survival, an outdoor convention to discuss ways of protecting the earth from industrial and government rapists and exploiters. We met on a sheep ranch seven miles south of Rapid City. Thousands of people from all over the world attended, and there were many innovative alternative-energy exhibits. The gathering took place in lovely rolling pastures with the beautiful Black Hills as a backdrop. Anyone could feel the power of the thunder spirits who gather above the hills.
Surrounded by the beauty of the Black Hills and with the innovativeness of the alternative-energy exhibits, again: where’s the fear? Where’s the fear of Earth’s retaliation and of the major catastrophe that Means prophesies three-quarters into his speech? The threat, he says, is in the continued ascendancy of the European. The European must die if America, or the world, is to be saved. “When I use the term European,” Means explains, “I’m not referring to a skin color or a particular genetic structure. What I’m referring to is a mind-set, a worldview that is a product of the development of European culture. People are not genetically encoded to hold this outlook; they are acculturated to hold it.”
n a very real sense, all of us are indigenous peoples, all of us are as ancient as the Lakota or the Dine or the Haudenosaunee. All of us are rooted ancestrally to the land. My people—by which I mean the majority people of the US and Canada—are of the Caucasus mountains and plains, marshes and dry steppes, though I have no blood memory of such landscapes. This is true whether we identify our ethnicity as English (as I do), Italian, Swedish, or German, etc. Caucasians uprooted themselves and chased after an abstract and disconnected reality. They became European, and then they became American. I have friends who boast of the multi-generational connection of their families to the farm fields of Minnesota or Nebraska. I am one who revels in what Wendell Berry writes about his “native” Kentucky. But we Caucasians who think back one, two, or even three centuries, prove that we think back too smally. We simply prove that we are an indigenous people group who has become thoroughly Europeanised, that is, taken over by a particular mind-set or worldview. In the rest of the book, I don’t recall that Means ever uses the word European to describe my people; we are “the white man,” as one might expect from a founder of the American Indian Movement. But even that designation is a helpful clue to understanding what Means wants to teach us. For that matter, how often do we even encounter the term Caucasian anymore? We are just “white,” and in teaching that the Black Lives Movement has brought to the forefront in a way that AIM did not, “whiteness” is a thing. It is not, however, a pigmentation thing, nor is it a logical deduction thing, as a mixed-race child like Barack Obama can attest. Our “whiteness” is a social construct thing, or a mindset and worldview as Means calls it. The sooner we understand that whiteness is a thing, the sooner we can examine what kind of thing it is, the sooner we can critique it as something that doesn’t have to be intrinsic to ourselves, the greater our likelihood of escaping our own unique form of enslavement (as MLK taught), the greater likelihood that we will survive the coming environmental catastrophe (as Means predicts).
What then is the Europeanised mindset? Means calls it a “materialist tradition of despiritualizing the universe.” Means calls it the “same old European conflict between being and gaining.” Our people were likely more aware of being back when we lived in the Caucasus mountains, but we apparently chose gaining when we set our sights on taking over the land we now call Europe. And of course, there was gold to be gained, tobacco and sugar cane to be gained in the New World. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868—the treaty that Means spent his life trying to defend—may have been one final attempt at two sovereign nations fostering being, but it wasn’t long before the cry went out, “there’s gold in them thar hills,” as there was pastureland and creek bottom land, or uranium in the Black Hills of Means’ day. Means tells his audience,
Being is a spiritual proposition. Gaining is a material act. Traditionally, American Indians have always attempted to be the best people they could. Part of that spiritual process was and is to give away wealth, to discard wealth in order not to gain. Material gain is an indicator of false status among traditional people, while it is “proof that the system works” to Europeans. Clearly, there are two completely opposing views at issue here.
He says,
In terms of the despiritualization of the universe, the mental process works so that it becomes virtuous to destroy the planet. Terms like progress and development are used as cover words here, the way victory and freedom are used to justify butchery in the dehumanization process. For example, a real estate speculator may refer to “developing” a parcel of ground by opening a gravel quarry; development here means total, permanent destruction, with the earth itself removed. But European logic has gained a few tons of gravel with which more land can be “developed” through the construction of road beds. Ultimately, the whole universe is open—in the European view—to this sort of insanity.
At this point, Means is actually in danger of being turned into an easily recognizable trope: the wise old Indian who decries the harm done to Grandmother Earth (his term.) Means, at the time of his speech in 1980, is in danger of channelling the “Crying Indian” PSA that first appeared in the middle of our Saturday morning cartoons in 1971. “Some people have a deep, abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country, and some people don’t,” the PSA narrator said. “We do,” the white audience at the International Gathering for Survival in 1980 would have said. You and I would have said it too: “we are those some, respectful, people.” But what made Means’ speech famous and what drew the attention of the editors of Mother Jones to it was his critique of the Left in the environmental movement, in words appropriate today for Bernie Sanders, AOC, Naomi Klein, and perhaps you and I as well. In the end, Means argues, the only one who has the right to use the word revolution is Planet Earth herself.
There’s a rule of thumb which can be applied here. You cannot judge the real nature of a European revolutionary doctrine on the basis of the changes it proposes to make within the European power structure and society. You can only judge it by the effects it will have on non-European peoples. This is because every revolution in European history has served to reinforce Europe’s tendencies and abilities to export destruction to other peoples, other cultures and the environment itself. I defy anyone to point out an example where this is not true.
To explain this, Means takes up the case of uranium and coal mining on reservation lands, destructive enough to turn Indian lands into a “National Sacrifice Area,” the sacrifice being made for the sake of the nation’s energy needs. “It is genocide to dig uranium here and drain the water table—no more, no less,” Means claims.
Now let’s suppose that in our resistance to extermination we begin to seek allies (we have). Let’s suppose further that we were to take revolutionary Marxism at its word: that it intends nothing less than the complete overthrow of the European capitalist order which has presented this threat to our very existence. This would seem to be a natural alliance for American Indian people to enter into. After all, as the Marxists say, it is the capitalists who set us up to be a national sacrifice. This is true as far as it goes.
But, as I’ve tried to point out, this “truth” is very deceptive. Revolutionary Marxism is committed to even further perpetuation and perfection of the very industrial process which is destroying us all. It offers only to “redistribute” the results—the money, maybe—of this industrialization to a wider section of the population. It offers to take wealth from the capitalists and pass it around: But in order to do so, Marxism must maintain the industrial system. Once again, the power relations within European society will have to be altered, but once again the effects upon American Indian peoples here and non-Europeans elsewhere will remain the same. This is much the same as when power was redistributed from the church to private business during the so-called bourgeois revolution. European society changed a bit, at least superficially, but its conduct toward non-Europeans continued as before.
Means may be taking Marxist theory a bit too much at face value here. He became an avid reader of political philosophy during his one-year prison term in 1978. I think his point is that any plan for our troubled planet cannot be found in a debate between which way of gaining is better, or more equitable. We need to recover ways of being—whether as a Lakota or a Caucasian. I think his point is also that solutions to our problems—whether as Lakota or Caucasian—cannot be found by listening to Europeans because Europeanization—the materialist tradition of despiritualizing the universe—is at the root of our problems. We are long overdue in listening to non-European voices. For example, I for one am getting very close to the point of retiring the term creation care in describing my work. It’s a good term, originating in the church, easily understandable by my people, but I’ve witnessed two decades of Christian activists who are people of color gravitating more energetically to the term environmental justice. We Caucasians can’t find our way back to the mountains by retracing our steps through Europe. We need to find indigenous guides.
Means admits that Indians can become Europeanised as easily as Caucasians were. He says, “We have a term for these people; we call them ‘apples’—red on the outside (genetics) and white on the inside (their values). Other groups have similar terms: Blacks have their ‘oreos’; Hispanos have ‘coconuts’ and so on. And, as I said before, there are exceptions to the white norm: people who are white on the outside, but not white inside. I’m not sure what term should be applied to them other than ‘human beings.’” Ah, to be called a human being; wouldn’t that be nice? In fact, Means’ overall argument and this last comment suggest an exercise for you and me, particularly if we’ve ever been offended by being labelled a “watermelon,” as in: environmentalists are just watermelon; they are “green” on the outside but [Marxist/socialist] “red” on the inside. Stop getting defensive. Instead, accept it as a reminder of the extended work that we are called to do. Even those Green Leftists who are legitimately “red” on the inside, are “white” on the inside of that, just like their capitalist counterparts. The great hope is that on the inside of any social, political, or racial construct is an indigenous person wanting to switch out gaining for being, wanting to reconnect with Grandmother Earth.
There’s obviously a lot more to Means’ speech and autobiography than what I have pulled out here. I commend them both to you. I’m left with Means playful puzzlement about the way the word revolution is kicked around. The only revolutions that really signify in the end, Means contends, are the ones rooted in the processes created by God: the spinning of the Earth around its axis, the journey of the planet around the sun.
All European tradition, Marxism included, has conspired to defy the natural order of all things. Mother Earth has been abused, the powers have been abused, and this cannot go on forever. No theory can alter that simple fact. Mother Earth will retaliate, the whole environment will retaliate, and the abusers will be eliminated. Things come full circle, back to where they started. That’s revolution. And that’s a prophecy of my people, of the Hopi people and of other correct peoples.
American Indians have been trying to explain this to Europeans for centuries. But, as I said earlier, Europeans have proven themselves unable to hear. The natural order will win out, and the offenders will die out, the way deer die when they offend the harmony by overpopulating a given region. It’s only a matter of time until what Europeans call “a major catastrophe of global proportions” will occur. It is the role of all natural beings, to survive. A part of our survival is to resist. We resist not to overthrow a government or to take political power, but because it is natural to resist extermination, to survive. We don’t want power over white institutions; we want white institutions to disappear. That’s revolution.
American Indians are still in touch with these realities—the prophecies, the traditions of our ancestors. We learn from the elders, from nature, from the powers. And when the catastrophe is over, we American Indian peoples will still be here to inhabit the hemisphere. I don’t care if it’s only a handful living high in the Andes. American Indian people will survive: harmony will be reestablished. That’s revolution.
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Russell Means with Marvin J. Wolf, Where White Men Fear to Tread (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995).