Joshua Minton’s Online Pulpit : An Open Letter to Native Americans

At the time this letter is being written, the farthest named planet of our solar system, Pluto, has not revolved once around the Sun since the United States of America has been a sovereign nation. The word sovereign has several meanings, three of which are:

above or superior to all others
of or holding the position of rulers
very effectual, as a cure or remedy

American history has taught us that the first definition is the proper reference when discussing the United States. However, there is a hidden history that is not discussed in high school and college history courses across the nation. This hidden history has enormous implications to the citizens of this nation and the heritage of which we claim to part of; the dirty little secret being that the United States of America was partly built on the genocide of your culture and the enslavement of Africans. But this country was also built on some big ideas which have allowed us the opportunity to step back from our shared history and put things into the perspective that only big ideas with good intentions allow.

The word genocide is curious because it evokes different responses in different people. The definition of genocide is: the systematic killing of, or a program of action intended to destroy, a whole nation or ethnic group. The goal of my country’s actions towards you has been your complete assimilation into our society. Since I’m not a politician or a member of the military and since I exert no official power other than a conscience and a skill with words; and because I live in a country founded upon big ideas, I can write that sentence with very few repercussions. And this society, America, has always been a fantastic mess. The ideal of an egalitarian utopia where human beings pull themselves up by their own bootstraps is a magnificent lie that Americans generally agree upon.

Before I started studying your part of our history together, I thought it was all teepees and birds and wolves and bears, general fantasy. But I now understand that some nations in your culture actually enjoyed this equality my culture has dreamed about for so long–and there were others of your tribes who did not enjoy such a balance of freedom and responsibility. There is much about our histories together which are fiction and another lie dispelled for me is that all native peoples of North America were (are) the same, of the same culture, speak the same language, look the same and worship the same ideologies.

Before I started studying your part of our history, I believed that the arrival of the Europeans on this continent was the first time your people had seen a civilized government with rules, rituals and methods of distributing power for social maintenance. I know now that the Great Iroquois Confederacy is the oldest standing political body on the North American continent. Excuse me for the former belief in my own culture’s superiority; it’s what I was taught and had to unlearn.

Speaking of unlearning, I understand that some people on this planet see being born as a great forgetting and the process of life as a journey of remembering secret knowledge that lies hidden because we search for it. I don’t know if any of you feel this way, but I see great wisdom in that insight. Beliefs can be a very strong cement between human beings but they can also become the greatest causes of strife and murder and the largest barriers to peace and spiritual evolution.

As of the writing of this letter [Fall 1999], my culture, fascinated with the end of all things, is preparing for the year 2000. There are, in my culture, what we call Armageddon groups that believe a breakdown of society will occur and human beings will become cannibals and regress back to primitive ways. Many people would say that these primitive ways are represented by what your cultures once were.

Whenever some people in my culture speak of Indians, in their heads they see great chiefs with war paint, straddling horses with bows and arrows. But when I speak of your cultures, I now see them as a great mystery thrown into the fog of history barely told. I cannot understand a way of life where I am not forced to look out for myself first. In my culture, they teach us that self-preservation is the highest law, the first rule of life. I don’t know if I agree with this because sometimes I feel like something more than human, like these muscles nerves, tendons and bones are just a holding tank for a spirit so strong that it could rupture everything biological, scientific (and yes, historic). I feel a force in the quiet times of the late night or the early morning, a force which sometimes feels like it could burst from my skull and my chest and pull every other person’s energy from their body and unite in a great fire ball of spiritual energy like a white hole in space and time which will rape, murder and euthanize injustice, seting the scales back in balance on the sharpest point of a razor. Sometimes I feel like this but mostly I just feel weighted down my the mass of my skin and the chains of history we have forged like Jacob Marley in the Dickens story which can save our lives if we’re smart enough to hear the words behind the words.

Sometimes history is just too heavy a load to bear all by yourself; I’m sure you understand this because I learned it from studying ours. And I apologize for taking so long to catch up but the hurdle of American history is one that you have to climb over while being fired at with a high powered rifle.

This century has shown a distinct evolution in the actions of my culture towards your cultures. We have gone from stealing your children and indoctrinating them in prisons masked as schools to moving you around to large cities to try and get you to integrate into our ways of living. When this didn’t work, we threw up our hands and said, “Okay, we’re out of ideas. You do it yourselves.”

We gave you a little bit of money, enough to divorce you from reality long enough so you no longer tasted how bad the food was, how stale the air had become and how the water left a metallic ringing on your tongues which did nothing to take away the sting of remembering before you had forgotten. Some of you prospered in these conditions and some of you holed yourselves up in compounds and fired at us. I’m sorry my culture put you in this position, it’s just that we have fought for so long–against death, against life, against God–that we know nothing else but the fight. I see now, almost too late, that love is the only engine of survival. Without love, the rotation of this Earth might as well be witnessed by garden slugs and it may well be. But I want you to know that I have heard you. I have listened to your history. I have listend to my history. I now listen to our history and our history is a strange thing because it changes through time and through the person telling it.

Why is it all so god damned complicated?

I understand that some of you feel that our problems will not end until we return your land and your resources to you. I don’t think this will happen. I don’t get to make those decisions and even if I did, I’m not sure I’d choose to give them to you. I fear my culture may have changed your cultures and maybe not for the better. We gave you the concepts of land ownership, male dominance, the consumption of alcohol and religious murder and cruelty fueled by blood whoring conquest idols disguised as compassionate saviors.

I don’t know if any human being alive is righteous enough to truly claim ownership of one grain of dust on this earth and perhaps one day, we will find a way to make sharing work. But right now, my culture believes that communal ownership of land and resources isn’t just a bad idea, it’s pure evil. Our entire paradigm of life is structured on the concept that there are rigid spaces which define our individual personalities and that if these spaces were erased, everything we have fought for, died for and murdered for would all be for nothing. We fear that great white hole which dissolves all injustices might just be a reality which would not be so kind to us is in its cold judgement and it’s because of this fear that we retain this land, these resources and the lie we agree upon each and every day we walk and breath and interact on this planet. I understand your argument that we are living on illegally occupied land but I didn’t choose where I was born and I believe I have as much claim to occupy this land and this moment in time as you do.

A very wise man once said that all human beings receive information about the world in the same biological way and that the differences between people and cultures come from the differing way we interpret the same information. This interpretation is what my culture calls experience and we worship these wisps of memory as if they existed independently from the minds which created them, like the trees outside and the water that flows on this great solar orb. We believe that history is the greatest teacher and it matters to us if the deities and personalities we worship actually walked the earth and physically did the things our stories tell us they did.

Perhaps we are wrong to assume that experience is a reality separate from our minds–we can’t touch it, we can’t physically manipulate it with our fingers but it is still there, as real to us as the warmth of the sun on our faces at noon in the summertime. But as long as I have my experience and my experience is different from yours,’ we both demand control of the land, the resources and this moment in time and it seems we have reached yet another stalemate in our history. At the beginning of this new age of reason, it was believed that human beings would solve our problems with words instead of with bombs, guns, blood and murder but a war of words is more viscious, even if less bloody, than a physical war.

I’m particularly impressed with the resistance to assimilation that your cultures have put up since our arrival almost over 600 years ago. But there is a difference between a rebellion and a revolution. A rebellion is a turning away from the accepted ideals of the time. A rebellion usually begins with a firestorm of political passion and dwindles into a meaningless riot and senseless murder, when people begin looting the institutions of their own communities. But a revolution is a complete change of thought in the general population, a Great Awakening which begins in the minds and hearts of individuals and explodes into a white hole of spiritual force which wipes all debts clean and erases all pain as tear stained eyes draw themselves infant-like to the rising of a new sun in the sky.

There is nothing to be gained from senseless murder, bombing buildings, making speeches, stockpiling guns and the endless river of bullshit about the end of the world or the second coming of whatever flavor deity some cruel adult stuck in one’s head as a child. Revolution is a complete ending of images in relationship with one another. Why would any sane human being waste their energy trying to change and fix an already decaying system? Surely true change will only come about by people without moral or religious agendas, by simple human beings without political plans of action dictating what’s best for other human beings in the abstract. Surely true change will only come about through compassion and love, the only engine of survival that actually works to secure peace and the future.

My culture is in a great period of struggle with ourselves, with you and a thousand other nations. We believed that we were gods on this planet (or at least the children of gods), put here to incorporate other human beings and natural resources in the goal of achieving absolute comfort and total control. But this goal has caused a spiritual and moral chasm in our lives, one that we can no longer function with–not if we wish to go on calling ourselves human beings.

My culture has accomplished some of the greatest feats ever attempted by the human race but we are also guilty of the greatest cruelty because when you pick up one end of the knife you must also pick up the other. We must come to terms with our history, you and I. If we are to lay down this genocidal knife that we have held to your throats for so long, would you pick it back up and strike for revenge? Or would you kick it over the edge of the cliffs of human evolution along with the anger we must all learn to shed like the skin of a rattlesnake? Would you then lend us a hand so we may climb together with our collective strength and energies?

I know this much, we are much more alike than we are different and in this statement lies the ultimate journey we must make as individuals and as nations.

There will always be two sides to an argument and there will always be ignorant people as well as intelligent ones to counter them. I do not believe that oppressed people will remain oppressed because it is in the spirit of man to seek freedom and it is in the spirit of man to ultimately yield to this pursuit when it becomes it’s greatest obstacle.

As a human being and member of a temporarily dominant culture, I promise to teach my children our history which I have learned with you; I promise to make them aware of both sides of the issue. I promise, to the limitations of my mortal mind, to challenge cruelties as I see them arise in my daily life. And if you have something to say, I promise to listen. As a human being, there is nothing more I could expect from another person to correct the wrongs of the past and I hope you can accept my individual apology.

While this may be the great decline of Western civilization, it could also be the birth of a new age of understanding between cultures, a new rennaissance of humanity that begins with the realization that we are not as different as our history and our television teaches us. We can, with this epiphany, respect the boundaries of other cultures while at the same time recognizing the common humanity that lies deeper than those differences and which can be found by simply looking into each other’s eyes.

Human civilization hasn’t been around that long, roughly forty-one revolutions of Pluto around the Sun, but we’ve learned much since then. Sovereign doesn’t always mean that one group is controlling another. And perhaps if we communicate well enough and speak and act from our common humanity, then we can begin to use the latter definition of the word sovereign, the one that means very effectual, as a cure or remedy.

With great hopes for the future and the present,

Joshua Minton
Thanksgiving Day, 1999

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