(From Measure, the literary magazine of Saint Joseph’s College, 2016)
The late afternoon sun stretches a shadow preposterously across the field and up the rusted shell of a pickup truck. It could have been the shadow of Geronimo, or one of his young Apache warriors. It could have been the shadow of Sitting Bull, when he was still called Tatanka Yotanka and wore his braided feather with pride. It could have been the shadow of Crazy Horse, whose original Lakota name meant either “in the wilderness” or “among the trees.” It could have been the shadow of Tecumsuh, or his brother with the gift of sight. It could have been the shadow of Wavoka of the Paiute.
But the shadow has a far more humble source: my own back turned against the sun—a horseless warrior of untested courage with eyes that strain to interpret the clear and palpable present. And while my eyes fight to maintain their focus, the shadow’s gathered darkness begins to fold in on itself at the grassy edges as if to unwrap the past and send Wavoka’s spirit through to braid my scattered thoughts into purposeful strands.
Or maybe it is something about the wind.
There comes a time when a people have been held down for so long that the last vestiges of cultural identity start to fade and even the grandmothers have trouble remembering how things used to be, how they are supposed to be, a time when a potent kind of reality-defying courage sets in. It occurs just as the last embers of hope for return to the old ways extinguish, when the cold reality of the situation—and its permanence—takes hold. It is then, after reality has steadfastly refused to accommodate the demands of desire, that desire seeks its final refuge in dreams.
There have been those rare occasions, of course, in which courage has won out—at least for a time. There have been occasions in which the jaws of the all-consuming leviathan have been made to burst apart from their own expanding force, leaving in their bloody wake a period of calm rediscovery before the next monstrous incarnation lumbers over the eastern horizon. But courage by itself, even courage fortified by dream, is no match for a creature that is incapable of fear or pain, a creature that might be wounded but never killed, a creature that when dismembered only reassembles more durably, a creature that when beaten back only regenerates into a more ravenous form, a lethal and incurable cancer.
The pattern has repeated countless times through the last eight or nine thousand years, and on every peopled continent—desire forced to seek its final refuge. Those dreams that don’t completely dissolve to ash are inevitably re-appropriated as images to adorn newly crafted versions of history, nostalgic artifacts as evidence that the conquered were worthy if inferior opponents, that conquest was for the victim’s benefit: a compassionate cultural euthanasia. So in our own time we have museums where the great grandchildren of agents of genocide can marvel at the sophisticated stitching and the primitive earthy texture of deerskin shoes behind a glass case, shoes worn by a young girl bludgeoned to death as she tried to run from the soldiers who had just shot her father in the back of the head while he slept and disemboweled her pregnant mother.
Courage and dream are insufficient. There is something else, some additional element necessary to render an effective alchemy.
And the wind chants an ancient hymn. Hey-a-a-hey! Hey-a-a-hey! Hey-a-a-hey!
***
One day an old Cherokee brave told his grandson that inside every person there is a battle between two wolves. One wolf is the evil wolf. It is hatred, lies, anger, envy, sorrow, arrogance, and the like. The other wolf is the good wolf. It is love, kindness, peace, joy, empathy, charity, happiness, and the like. After the boy thought on this for a while, he asked his grandfather, “Which wolf wins?” To which the old man replied, “The one you feed.”
While teaching a class on how to make a traditional elk skin drum, a Navajo man told the old Cherokee story of the two wolves. He also told what he called “a new Indian story” about the giving tree, although it sounded suspiciously like the reworking of a children’s book that I once read to my daughter. He started by asking what the tree does for us, the specific services trees provide such as food, shade, breathable air, warm fire, and wood for making the frames for Navajo drums. The students in the class provided several other examples, and it was clear that the list could go on for some time. The tree gives all these things freely, the man said, and it does so without ever asking anything in return. The tree always gives and never takes. You can cut off the tree’s arms (notice we call our own arms limbs, he said), and it doesn’t complain. You can drive nails into its body to hang a yard sale sign or carve your sweetheart’s initials deep into its skin, and although it bleeds sap from its wounds, still it gives freely. The tree is always ready to give. You can cut it off from its roots, strip off its leaves and branches and bark, soak it in chemicals and pine tar, put it into a hole without any root base for support and nourishment, and force it to hold up heavy telephone and electrical wires for years and years, and still it answers to its task without complaint. It never holds a grudge over past misdeeds. It never refuses out of spite or anger to give what is asked of it. The man ended the story by explaining that we should all strive to be like the tree, strive to never take and always be willing to give freely regardless of past transgressions. Never ask what’s in it for us.
As I worked the fringe of a moist swatch of elk hide into shape by pulling it across the rounded metal back of a folding chair as if I was trying to thin the edges of a stubborn leather piecrust, it occurred to me that this story was being told by someone who was born and raised on a reservation, and that that fact was not incidental to the story’s meaning and its intended moral. The intended message is obviously about the importance of charity and humility and forgiveness, very noble character aspirations. But this story also contains another message, a dark and decidedly inhuman message to accept the role of victim without question, to not protest your lot in life, and to continue to give to those in power regardless of how they frame their demands—even after they have taken everything and you have nothing left to give but your very life itself. At its root, the story of the giving tree is not a story of humility or empathy or forgiveness or charitable beneficence, it is a story of subjugation and domination so thoroughgoing that the blind acceptance of oppression has been made into a virtue.
The giving tree? Every minute a moist swatch of rain forest the size of a football field is forcefully and permanently “gifted” out of existence—three and a half million trees an hour.
It is probably no accident that all of the major religions of civilization incorporate some variation on this theme into their ethics. The Christian is told that the struggles of this life are a test, and that the most painful personal loss is all part of God’s inscrutable plan. The pious are willing to shoulder the grief and misery others forcefully pile on them during this life because the truly righteous will be rewarded in the afterlife. After all, it is the meek who inherit the earth. Religious mandate renders inert the incendiary fact that the relationship between those who are made to shoulder and those who provide the load is not a voluntary one. The Buddhist approach too, and perhaps in a more meticulous and exhaustive way than the Christian, conveniently serves the interests of power. For the Buddhist, corporeal reality is an illusion with no real substance, and attachment to this illusion is the root of all suffering. Possessions are an obstacle to nirvana. Those in power are doing the rest of us a favor by arranging for our material impoverishment. Even more absurd, the wealthy, with their full bellies and comfortable living conditions, are not to be envied, but are instead to be pitied for their spiritual ignorance—they only think they are living the good life. Karma’s a bitch.
And is it then a mysterious and unexplainable paradox that the bloodiest massacres have holy agendas: the crusades of Christians, the jihads of Muslims?
Civilization is designed specifically to exploit and channel the coercive motivating potential of unequal access to power and resources. The more complex the civilization, the more nuanced and sophisticated the unequal access has to be. Inequality is a prerequisite for division of labor, and the base metal for civilization. All would be fine if every job was equally rewarding or equally dreadful. But somebody has to do the planning and brainwork, and coal doesn’t mine itself. And you need far more coal miners than planners, so power and access are by necessity pyramidal in structure, with the masses performing the least pleasant work while an elite minority reaps almost all of the benefits. No system based on subjugation of the masses could ever be made to work without pervasive fear and an extremely potent mythology of justification—and plenty of outright violence, of course. When Buddha proclaimed that “life is suffering,” he was speaking to a civilized audience, and his message was directed at the masses on behalf of the elite, quelling resistance and greasing the psychological gears of exploitation. Five hundred years later Jesus advised turning the other cheek, and, while you are at it, be sure to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.
But there is something even more insidious about the Navajo drum maker’s tree story than its diversion of blame and undercurrent of genocidal codependency, something that bothered me at the time I heard it and still bothers me deeply, something that feels uncomfortably like self-immolation.