§1. Four Arrows (Cherokee Philosopher) exposes anti-Indianism “so as to encourage more people to awaken to the perspectives about life that guided human behaviors for most of our history, before “God moved indoors,” to quote my old friend, Sam Keen”
§2. “The grim prognosis for life on this planet is the consequence of a few centuries of forgetting what traditional societies knew, and the surviving ones still recognize. We must nurture and preserve our common possession, the traditional commons, for future generations, and this must be one of our highest values, or we are all doomed. To regain this sensibility from those who have preserved it we must pay careful attention to their understanding and practices.” (Noam Chomsky, 2013)
A. The “Dances-with-wolves” approach to Native American history
§3. The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend (2013) by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin, given positive reviews by such prestigious and progressive publications as Salon and the Boston Globe which refer to the book’s “exceptional fairness and accuracy,” is a straight-forward example of gross anti-Indian bias, racism and fundamental misunderstandings about indigenous society and worldview and “the continued demeaning of Native Peoples, an approach that prioritizes Euro-centric people and values and ignores or dismisses the present by romanticizing or distorting the past.” (5)
§4. Red Cloud (Maȟpíya Lúta in Lakota, 1822-1909), Leader of the Oglala Lakota band, led successful military campaigns against the US army during Red Cloud’s War (1866-1868) in Wyoming and Montana, culminating in the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868) which established the Great Sioux Reservation including Sioux ownership of the Black Hills, and set aside additional lands as unceded Indian territory in areas of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Nebraska, and possibly Montana. The treaty formed the basis of the 1980 Supreme Court case, United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, in which the court ruled that tribal lands covered under the treaty had been taken illegally by the US government, and the tribe was owed compensation plus interest. As of 2018 this amounted to more than $1 billion. The Sioux have refused the payment, demanding instead the return of their land.
§5. Based on questionable scholarship by white historians who use a discredited white person’s unauthorized autobiography of Red Cloud; Uses the word “savage” repeatedly, widely used in the 19th century to describe Native peoples; Totally ignorant of the spiritual and historical meaning of the Black Hills (Paha Sapa) for the Lakota people; Dismisses Lakota tradition and history which holds that the Lakota lived in the Black Hills for centuries.
B. Lakota society was not patriarchal but rather matrilineal
§6. Calvin & Drury assert that the Lakota are not only patriarchal, but that “the “Sioux” men badly treated their woman who, according to the authors, were “closer to slaves than second-class citizens by modern standards of thinking” (p.65). But “Women controlled most of the tribe’s resources. When men married, they lived with the wife’s relatives. Women elders were highly respected and adult women had equal power in decision-making. The children belong to the mother’s clan. Today, in spite of the loss of language and culture and in spite of hundreds of years of anti-matrilineal propaganda, the Lakota women are still the backbone of the Lakota nation.” (7)
§7. “Women are missing-in-action in nearly all studies of Native America, whether historical, social or anthropological. I believe this is because westerners are still reacting to the panic that European patriarchs felt upon discovering Turtle Island chock-full of self-directed, articulate, and confident Native women, all demanding to be dealt with as equals. The initial Euro-male horror was frank and obvious in first-contact records and the recoil remains, skewing discussion.” (8)
§8. Birth of the women’s rights movement in the territory of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Peoples in 1848 by Elizabeth Stanton, Matilda Joslyn Gage and Lucretia Mott.
C. Out-of-Context Emphasis on Warfare
§9. Supports the idea that war is natural part of humanity: “by applauding the Indian’s warrior traits while also picturing them as dirty, blood-thirsty, women-dominating savages, they show that this part of human nature, i.e. being war-oriented, proves that it is a good thing modern civilization took over.” (9)
§10. The development of western civilization as sufficient justification for genocide: “We did it for civilization” (10)
§11. Atrocities of American soldiers as temporary insanities versus the Indian’s inherent procivility towards violence, recalls Charles Mill’s point from The Racial Contract: Non-Europeans as savages, who live in the ‘wild.’ The classical social contract defines human beings by negation: we are the nonsavages, the ones who made it out of the ‘state of nature.’
§12. Peace as the default condition of traditional societies: “Peaceable preindustrial (preliterate, primitive, etc.) societies constitute a nuisance to most theories of warfare and they are, with few exceptions, either denied or “explained away.”
“The Original Affluent Society” by Marshall Sahlins in Stone Age Economics
§13. “Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times…”
§14. “There are two possible courses to affluence. Wants may be "easily satisfied" either by producing much or desiring little. The familiar conception, the Galbraithean way- based on the concept of market economies- states that man's wants are great, not to say infinite, whereas his means are limited, although they can be improved. Thus, the gap between means and ends can be narrowed by industrial productivity, at least to the point that "urgent goods" become plentiful. But there is also a Zen road to affluence, which states that human material wants are finite and few, and technical means unchanging but on the whole adequate. Adopting the Zen strategy, a people can enjoy an unparalleled material plenty - with a low standard of living. That, I think, describes the hunters. And it helps explain some of their more curious economic behaviour: their "prodigality" for example- the inclination to consume at once all stocks on hand, as if they had it made. Free from market obsessions of scarcity, hunters' economic propensities may be more consistently predicated on abundance than our own. Destutt de Tracy, "fish-blooded bourgeois doctrinaire" though he might have been, at least forced Marx to agree that "in poor nations the people are comfortable", whereas in rich nations, "they are generally poor”.
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