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We’ve failed at it before.
The year was 1876 and the leadership under President Ulysses S. Grant felt it was once again time to make treaties with the rowdy, godless savages of the Northern plains. The 1851 treaty under President Fillmore had been fine, allowing the whites to move west. But things had changed for the whites, so another treaty was made in 1868 under President Andrew Johnson. This was also fine, but now things had changed again. Gold had been found in the Black Hills, and the Lakota held it by treaty.
This would not do.
It’s of note that the Black Hills were (and are) a holy place to the Lakota. It was a temple, a place of Sun Dances and Vision Quests, the “Heart of All That Is.” Still, General Custer himself had led an unlawful expedition into the land and found it to be of surpassing beauty. And gold, clearly the language of the white God, was in abundance.
The Natives had no use for gold. In “Black Elk Speaks,” the Narrator says that they knew it was there, “lying in chunks in the streams.” But as it was soft, they had no use for it.
Why then, the Government reasoned, couldn’t the treaties be reworked in favor of the new nation?
Contingents were sent to present this idea to supposed spokesmen for the People, the once-fierce warrior Red Cloud among them. But things didn’t work that way in Native Culture. No one man could speak for all the people. In the greatest anarchic democracy that could ever be devised, if a man disagreed with a clan chief, he was free to move his tipi to another clan without reprisal. That was what voting looked like for the People. The question of selling the Black Hills didn’t compute. It was inconceivable, unless a man had lost his soul.
Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, the best-known of the “wild Lakota” and all that followed them, felt that Red Cloud and those who followed him had indeed lost theirs.
So, the “peace talkers” -the treaty negotiators- arrived. Funny, it occurred to the Natives, that they always had soldiers with them. In the end, the treaty was somehow validated to the satisfaction of the whites and the great confusion of the vast majority of the American Indians.
But the question was never merely about gold. Fundamentally, it was about co-existing with a people that held different values. In this, the leadership of the United States miserably failed.
In fact, the values of both the American Indians and the whites were strikingly similar. Both claimed to value honesty. Both believed in God, albeit different things about God. Both valued courage and family. Both loved freedom.
The differences in the application of these, however, was problematic.
Had the United States the capacity to act with integrity, they might have forsaken the Black Hills as a lost opportunity. After all, they’d already broken treaties with the Chickasaw and Cherokee when gold was discovered in Georgia, half a century before. Maybe enough was enough? The U.S. could have built their nation around Lakota lands and allowed the People to decide for themselves how much of white culture they might embrace, and when.
Instead, what arose was yet more toxic implementation of Manifest Destiny. This doctrine said essentially that this is God’s land and the whites were God’s people. Furthermore, any group not subscribing to this notion, especially if they had the audacity to defend their ways of life through deadly force, had to be righteously swept away.
So, the American Indian was swept away – albeit hardly “righteously.”
Bison, the food stores of the People, were unceremoniously killed by the millions in the name of capitalism. Sacred items were confiscated. Children were machine-gunned in snowy swales. Men and women were imprisoned or worse, brainwashed. And the great wave of white culture swept up, over and through the Native lands, a “great flood, dirty with lies,” as Black Elk, a first-person witness, testified.
This was the end of a substantial test of whether our national consciousness would choose to coexist with a people who were different from ourselves. It had been going on for hundreds of years, and we failed.
When it arguably came to a head in the 1960’s, a second test had been festering for decades. Blacks were segregated, and people had had enough of it. Once again, a flavor of Manifest Destiny had come to light. Blacks, the religious right argued, were the dirty stepchildren of slavery, sons and daughters of the Biblical, cursed Ham. They were lower than whites; less evolved, dirty.
In spite of well-documented Presidential prejudice – Johnson and Nixon, particularly – more had begun to speak up and a critical mass was reached. Some took the road of violence to foment change, notably the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground. In the end, too many people saw reasons for segregation to be stopped.
Although this integration is far from complete, at least we’ve had a black President, and vast groups of people from all walks of American life see the injustices that Blacks experience in terms of opportunity, income variance and police attention.
To say this is a “win” would be a stretch, as it would it be to say it’s a loss. Let’s, for the sake of argument, call it, “unification in process,” as halting as it may be.
It’s admittedly rather simplistic to say we’ve had merely two chances to unify with others before now. Even so, we now stand on the threshold of yet another opportunity to integrate with those with whom we share values, albeit in ways that look different from ours. As before, with both the Blacks and the American Indians, at the head of this Nation stands a man who wishes to build a wall.
A wall from whom?
It’s no coincidence that the feared populace is generally brown-skinned. I’d like to believe differently, but it’s always been the darker pigments that seem to “threaten” white “progression.” This is simply a matter of history.
So, we have a choice, represented in two broad steps. The first step is what I call, “informational vigilance.”
In the 1800’s, it was easier for the populace to be seduced by tall tales. After all, stories of the greatest loss of military life in the Indian Wars, that of the 7th Calvary at Little Bighorn, took over a week to be published by the papers back East. Rumors were (arguably) held as broader truth than they are now, and certainly harder to “fact check.”
Similarly, although more honest and forthright than today’s news stations, even the 1960’s were the stone ages compared to now as far as the dissemination of information goes. The main challenge is seeing beyond what’s presented – the loaded words, the passionate presentation – into the actual truth. This takes practice and unblinking critical thought, no matter what we hope to be true.
Once informed, our choice is to then operate from the level of soul, which seeks wholesome unification, rather than through the mind, which seeks provocative division. Our evolution as a Nation and as human beings can be summed up this way: find the mystic connection to as many people as we can.
What’s a mystic connection?
It’s what I described above – to find the commonalities in spite of the differences, which, if we are to embody the “We Are One” doctrine, are superficial. We do this by compassionately considering the effects of our words and our actions on others, human and non-human alike, and the experiencing unity we feel as we so do.
This takes deep mindfulness, but we practice that when we meditate, don’t we?
Ironically, the embodiment of Jesus’ words is the very thing that will get us out of the mess that the author of Manifest Destiny (generally, wayward Christianity) has gotten us into. The words are simple, and we’ve all heard them.
They are, “love thy neighbor as thyself.” That’s about as “Namaste” as it gets.
With practice, and with compassion towards ourselves and others, maybe this time we’ll summon the courage and love we need in order to evolve. Maybe this time, we’ll unify.
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Photo: Pixabay