Capitalism and Native Americans - Essay

This is ostensibly a letter to a dear and deeply respected family member. I doubt he’ll ever see it, but I find myself defining and refining my own thoughts via the ample food I am given through interaction with my family. They’re truly great people; we just disagree on some fundamental points. The situation that brought this essay about was a conversation we had at breakfast. 

You said something this morning about the casinos helping the Native Americans. Something about that statement struck a chord in me, but I needed to sit with it in order to winnow the wheat from the chaff of that reaction, to see what was egoic aversion to any simple answer to the white’s interaction with them and what rang deeper within me. I definitely felt something move in my heart. And, after pondering it for the past few hours, I think I have come to some conclusions about what it was that did so.

No doubt the casinos have had an effect. Some have been huge financial successes, others have closed after a few years and left yet another scar upon the People. I think my issue was with the idea that money fixes the challenges that the Native People face. After spending quite a bit of time with them, I am entirely convinced it does not, nor will it ever. Who’s at fault for this is not the issue. It has more to do with the nature of money, which is never a permanent fix in and of itself – just ask the majority of lottery winners. I have come to understand that it is nothing more than a convenient transfer of energy and intent. It can truly reveal to ourselves more about who we are in many cases. Now, if a person has only a sufficient amount of money to live and they spend it to survive, it won’t say much. After all, we all want to survive. But when there is a surplus, things get more interesting. There are plenty of stories in the media about the trouble that politicians, movie and sports stars conjure up with their surplus cash. It’s easy to see in some cases where their priorities lie, what their values are, what their intentions are. For example, look at the recent Lamar Odom situation. He was found passed out and critically ill in a Nevada brothel. It’s no good to condemn the man – we are not in his shoes – but the event does indicate a few things about his values, at least at the time he made those choices.

Money is also the oil that makes the machine of capitalism work. Without a convenient means of trade, capitalism is a very unwieldy economic system. Money makes it so we don’t have to trade with chickens and sugar beets, for instance. Mr. Odom might have been far more sexually frustrated (yet safer) if he’d had to find a dealer and a brothel that happened to be short on beets and chickens, assuming he had a surplus to trade. Money makes it work far smoother. Better even, it turns out, than gold; although it was gold that prompted some of the men, women and children that settled illegally into the Northern Plains in the late 1800’s to risk their lives. To the Natives of that day, gold was a worthless, soft metal they found lying in creeks, particularly in their most sacred lands, called “The Heart of All That Is”: the Black Hills. They found that it made the white men crazy and were amazed at its power over them; so much so that they would even risk their lives for it - and put the lives of their women and children at risk as well. The whites would lie, cheat, steal, kill…all for this strange metal that somehow conferred power.

The Natives were eventually conquered by a numerically superior race that had no morals that were not overseen by their love of money. It could be argued that they were motivated by a desire for greater freedom, but this is irrelevant. It takes money to buy freedom – such as it is – in a capitalist system. In other words, if you love freedom in that system, you have to love money to an extent. Money is the measure of your love of freedom; not against other men but against your own circumstance. The wealthiest Americans don’t love freedom a billion times more than a homeless man. Since neither can live off the land, both are tied to circumstance and character and a desire to work within the system – or not –to gain independence within the system. Whether this is true freedom or not is a subject for discussion elsewhere. Suffice it to say that if not the love of money, the settlers’ motivation was at least the idea of freedom, and that can be as powerful as the real thing. At any rate, at the time of the “settling” of the West, that desire for the freedom that money can buy coupled with real industriousness, intelligence and insight, had created opportunities in the implements of warfare for many, many years before the whites finally decimated the Natives in the late 1800’s in arguably the last real genocidal act against them by the US government at Wounded Knee. The whites had better weapons, more soldiers and more ammunition than they. And they had a desire to possess the land that the Natives roamed, where they would be at least freer, where capitalist wealth could be had with hard work and sacrifice. Moreover, the religion of the conquerors told them the land was theirs to do with what they wanted, in so many words. One just had to run off the Natives first – clear the land, so to speak - and make wise financial choices from there and God would uphold them. This many of them did. The system was in place and the draw for many was irresistible.

Fast forward a couple hundred years. The White’s “assimilation” of the Natives has largely worked. No one on a reservation thinks they can survive off the game on the res. They all know they need a job, a house, a car. In short, the vast majority of them need money to live. There are a few left in the outer reaches of some of the reservations that survive off their sheep herds and what they can glean from the land and trade with distant neighbors. Some of the true medicine men and women live this way to this day. But these decrease in number year after year.

It’s easy to look at the reservations, which are third world countries unto themselves in the midst of one of the most prosperous nations on earth, and think of course more money would help the people. Adding to the confusion are anecdotal stories of increased wealth and prosperity among some tribes and individuals affected by the casinos. But more money will not help this people, as long as the “grass grows and the water flows”, a recurring phrase in some of the broken treaties between the tribes and the government of the trespassers.

That’s because the Native Americans (not to mention vast samples of the white populous) have a spiritual problem that far supersedes their financial struggles, as prolific as they are. The reason for this is they are a people whose spiritual DNA knows only how to live with the land as a relative, not as a thing to be conquered. The financial system, on the other hand, tells them that the land has to be thought of as dead, as an asset. Finally, they’re “Indians”, so staying on the res gives them some financial benefit as long as they remain there that is hard to pass up. Their Native spiritual life is dead, yet they are reminded every day they are Indians via their placement on the res. So what happens is a kind of amalgamation of watered-down Native religion coupled with the problems that come with deep poverty. Well, one might ask, why don’t they fix their spiritual problems by becoming Christian? It’s not that easy because modern Christianity, for the most part, doesn’t hold a candle to their Native spirituality.   

To say the Native American’s lived their religion is a trite statement. They had no religion. What they had were spiritual practices that bolstered their already present and apparent connection to Creator. In other words, their spiritual connection to Creator via the earth as an oracle was augmented by their daily lifestyle. On the other hand, a religion has boundaries in the form of commandments and dogma. All this supposedly comes from above, independent of the earth itself. The Native spirituality had neither formal dogma nor commandments. The Native either walked in integrity and connection with Creator or he didn’t. No one could tell another man what to do – that was the job of Spirit. Of course within ceremonies there were and are acceptable ways to act. But this was because in a ceremonial situation there is a recognized intercessor that organizes a “container” for the prayer of the group. This is done to maintain a certain order because they knew from long experience that that a container worked for such things. It was and is the intercessor’s responsibility to organize things in such a way that honors the Creator in all His/Her forms and that keeps the participants safe, spiritually and physically. So it makes sense to follow the instructions. Other than that, a person had their character to guide them, assisted in very real ways with the spirits of nature that were always present, whose language was familiar to them. It is important to realize that to the Native all things have a spirit. In other words, their spirituality is animistic. Everything is alive, from a mountain like Mt. Shasta – a sacred land to this day to many different spiritual seekers in disparate modalities – to oceans, lakes, animals, birds, clouds, lightning, planets, fire and fish to mention a few things, not to mention the earth herself. To this people, not only do “all things denote there is a God”, but all those things have their own voices, souls and personalities that speak for God. A badger may tell a woman walking in the woods to stand her ground in the coming days. A sacred plant like mullein may appear in a man’s dream and he may find it useful in the events of the next few hours. All these are the Voice of Creator to the Native American. The mouse is as wondrous as the eagle when he speaks his message because again - and this cannot be over emphasized – it comes from God, The Great Mystery or in Lakota, Wakan Tanka (wok-AHN TAHN-ka). A man’s earthly experience is full of this Voice,  from how his body operates to the things he experiences during the day.

Or it was.

To say that things are not this way now for the majority of Natives is a vast understatement. As previously mentioned, like the whites the Natives have become addicted to distraction, which takes the form of inane television shows, harsh and discordant music, food devoid of nutrition and overly sweet, porn, drugs, alcohol, self-hatred and self-gratification. Their sky has become polluted both literally and metaphorically and money has also become a God to many. The earth that once spoke all day, every day, has been paved over. The voices of the animals that once spoke Creator’s words to them have been run off. In short, they have become like their conquerors, with a two-fold exception: less money and less opportunity to make any. But again, throwing money to a soul-sick people is less than a temporary fix. Sad experience has shown that money given to any entity, from soul-sick individuals to soul-sick nations, will only increase the symptoms of their illness because they will use that new abundance in ways that only make their illness all that much more apparent and dangerous, just like Lamar Odom did.

The odd thing is that this change away from their ancestral spirituality was mandated by the conquering nation. Sacred objects were taken and smashed or trashed or placed in museums. Ceremonies were outlawed. Medicine people, innocent of any crime other than practicing their spiritual traditions, were placed in prison and brutally mistreated by enforcers of laws created by a government that supposedly held freedom of religion in high regard. War leaders and suspected troublemakers were summarily executed without a trial. But worse than any of that, children were forcibly taken and placed in the care of Christian leaders. Their hair was cut – a very significant slap in the face for a Native young man – they were forbidden to speak their language, they were made to wear uniforms and adopt the religion of the nation that had killed their way of life, with all its meaning and connection.

When I consider all this, it is brutally apparent to me that this is not the work of the humble teacher from Galilee whose kingdom was not of this world. This is something else. Only a people devoid of compassion and the influence of the Holy Spirit would act as the settlers of the West did. To say the Natives deserved it because they hadn’t accepted Jesus and that the whites were somehow chosen to punish them to conversion or death makes me slack-jawed with wonder at such so-called logic. If that’s how your God acts, you can have him. I want no part of it.  

So there it is. It appears to me that a sick nation without morals, compassion, vision or soul conquered the Native Americans and, like a virus, changed them into their own image. It was Manifest Destiny, a sad philosophy that continues to this day in spirit as our nation sees fit to “protect our way of life”, “protect our interests abroad” and enact laws that continually restrict our domestic freedoms. They’ve paved over the fields, leveled mountains and decimated forests, scattering the creatures that speak to the “two-leggeds” if they would only pause to hear, cutting all humankind off from the many voices of Creator.

And that’s something that money alone can never fix.