There is no such thing as “race”.

Emancipation must happen along ethnic lines because it is by virture of ethnicity that Indigenous people have so long been persecuted.

Emancipation by virtue of and for ethnicity must be the reason our struggle goes forward—the reason we have a struggle at all is because we are Indigenous and the reason Indigenous people are the most persecuted people on our home, the Earth, is solely because we are Indigenous and our ways of life are under attack by westerners.

Western ideology began in the “west” that is, European seats of “civilization” and is historically raced (that is, white), but today westernism is not just about skin, it is about mind.

Culture is a state of mind, after all.

It is a war of cosmology not simply ideology.

The line, the division, is there not because we have created it….it is there because the oppressor created it and we are simply responding to his threat to our very lives and lifeways as any reasonable living being would do to an external threat to their lives.

Wolves do not go out and hunt whites to the point of extinction; it is the other way around.

When a wolf attacks a human being it is because of an extreme circumstance…illness, hunger, encroachment, or because the wolf is cornered.

When a whiteman attacks a wolf it is out of fear, hatred, greed, ego, sport. When a whiteman seeks to eliminate wolves, they justify their fear and hatred of the wolf by calling them inherently evil, wild, untamed, an unforgivable threat, vermin.

When a wolf fights back against a whiteman, the whiteman calls them dangerous and a threat to human (read: white) life. And then they destroy them, utterly, finding justification in their genocide by virtue only because they are human/white/western.

For Indigenous people, what other reason is there for our struggle but for who we are? Like the wolf, we have been targeted for our “danger potential”—for as un-western as we are, that is how much of a potential danger we are to the whiteman.

To him we are savage and wild, strange and primitive; the westerner fears the “wildness” of “nature” because somewhere in his modern mind he understands that he really has no control over it….he likes and respects only that which he can potentially control.

The only good Injun is a dead Injun…(read: controlled)

The only good wolf is in a zoo or tagged and in the sights of a high-powered rifle…(read: controlled).

A dead injun doesnt have to be a stinking rotting carcass to be dead.

All s/he has to do is be divorced from his/her own history as an Indigenous person no longer discrete from his/her colonizer’s identity or his/her colonizer’s chosen identity for her/him.

All she/he has to do is believe the colonizer’s lie about the “past” being an abstract, dusty old, concept that has nothing to do with today, right now, this second.

White government and white society, (the culture in canada that has birthed the machinations of our oppression is European/white regardless of the color of the faces that sustain and maintain it today) are our enemy because they are rooted in a value system that is the exact anti-thesis of Indigenous value systems and which is inherently poisonous to an Indigenous traditional life system and living it.

Indigenous (Cree) ways value egalitarian balance (all life is sacred).
Western ways value inequitable hierarchies (white males are the most sacred, then white females; animals and plants are sacred only inasmuch as they benefit white males; Cree are anachronistic savages)

Indigenous (Cree) ways value humility and interrelatedness (we are all related afterall and we are only a small part of all of the creation of the Mystery)
Western ways value arrogance and compartmentalization (white male is god on earth; rigid ultra-binary ways of thinking…binariness not solely to contrast ideas, but the ONLY WAY REALITY IS MANIFEST)

Indigenous (Cree) ways value sharing and community wealth (our bands are comprised of blood relationships; greed is seen as destructive and negative. if i eat you eat, food is always given)
Western ways value greed and individual wealth (oil companies….donald trump….the hiltons….need i say more?)

Indigenous (Cree) ways value all beings as important in and of themselves (ie, we dont have to understand it, or exploit it, or even know of its existence for it to be important and sacred)
Western ways value things only inasmuch as these things can give them something or make them wealthy (often you hear scientists other people say things about animals and plants like: we should save them because of their potential in improving human life. very anthropocentrist)

Indigenous (Cree) ways value difference and individualism (most marked in traditional attitudes about homosexuality, “deformities”, medical conditions like epilepsy for example)
Western ways value conformity and self-centeredness (group think…more room in Cree culture to not conform to “popular ideas”. all about vanity and self in western world. the western world behaves as though aging is a disease!!!)

Indigenous (Cree) ways value community (before the thought-virus infected our communities, Cree embraced the idea of adoption and intermarriage with others not Cree—now they are afraid of it because of white ideas of “racial purity”. in traditional ways, we even adopted and married into our enemy tribes. we lived, fought for and died for our tribal community owing our first allegiance to our people, but we also had a great tradition of hospitality and strangers did not frighten us; we even accepted whites as full members into our communities).

Western ways value xenophobia (based in ideas of class, race, sex)

Indigenous (Cree) ways philosophized interconnectedness (we are all related)
Western ways philosophized a false dichotomy (we are separate “races”)

Indigenous (Cree) spirituality embraces all of creation and the Mystery (that all is sacred, that we are only a small part of creation not its masters, but its sibling, its relation, its dependent)
Western spirituality embraces only that part of creation made specifically for man and sees god as an anthropomorphic extension of himself (the bible teaches him that the earth was made for him and so were all the animals and plants and even woman was made for man; that man was made in the image of god: a white man)

There is no hell for Indigenous people and our spirituality is based on a deep love and respect for all of life.
The westerner is motivated by fear of hell, shame and a punitive man-god.

It is important to aspire toward an ideal and peaceful way to reconcile these two systems and traditional tribal definitions of respect must always be at the core of any Indigenous resistance…but there can be little compromise between the two spheres. This is because of the nature of white culture which is also called western culture.

Whiteness and its curse is a reality that needs to be addressed. White liberal guilt would have us deny our reality as oppressed peoples and construct a liberation movement that dismisses the history of European culture, westernism (social parasitism), as an inherently destructive culture.

It would have us approach our liberation not from a place of an historically racialized peoples who have been thus oppressed by virtue of this imagined racial category, but simply as human beings struggling against an unjust system based not in race, but economics.

That is only part of the story and the deracination of our struggle serves only to alleviate white guilt and privilege.

White culture is parasitic and amnesiatic at its heart. It is shallow and destructive; it is like a very powerful and undisciplined child who has been taught little respect for things and people outside of itself and its own understanding.

As it always is, there are good people of European ethnicity caught within the white cultural system who do not agree with it and do not know how to resist or challenge it; they don’t have a template or model for resistance. They have no ideological or philosophical model comparable with Indigenous modes of thought regarding egalitarianism and interconnectedness to guide them…they are struggling to internalize ideas of equity based in humanity not in sex, race or class.

For centuries they have been trained to accept the racist white power paradigm as a mystical reality from which there is no escape and no alternative.

The lie of manifest destiny and the so-called white man’s burden has been drilled into them before they are even able to walk.

The story of whiteness is so deeply embedded that few people can even think of “god” without picturing an old white man in white robes up in a white cloudy heaven.

The greed ethic is so deeply embedded in white culture that no one questions how the things they can buy are created and upon whose backs….while the reality is that these things are more than likely created by underpaid and underfed Indigenous people in “third world” regions.

In all things there must be balance.

Our struggle is not just material comfort…..to have a “piece of the pie” as so many Indigenous people keep saying.

That “pie” they so desperately want a slice of contains the bones of their Ancestors.

What insanity is it when an Indigenous person regards the land as a piece of pie exactly like a white man does?

It is called psychological colonization.

This struggle of ours goes beyond material comfort—we have starved before, we have lost family and friends in battle before, we have come close to leaving the earth forever before…..but never before have we ever faced the battle of losing our identity as Indigenous people!!!!!!!!!!

Through all the previous hardships we have stayed Indigenous and stayed true to the values and cultural philosophies of our Ancestral ways.

But today, now, our greatest struggle has yet to be fought and it is not one of material comfort, not one to “get a piece of the pie”.

It is to remain Indigenous in our thoughts, our hearts, our spirits, our minds, and our behaviors.

The lies of the colonizer are deep and clever: today it is all about “economic development” and “economic viability” everyone wants a casino and nobody cares enough to stop and really think about what that means. casinos….the epitome of white greed and western materialistic parasitism.

Some people say that there is nothing wrong with casinos because tribes have a tradition of gambling. Sure. Okay. These same tribes also more than likely have an ethic about not being greedy too.

Adopting western culture’s economic system is the next fastest way (if not the fastest) to become assimilated entirely (i.e. to become westernized) and to be well on your way to being a weekend warrior and STILL not have true sovereignty or self-determination….you will just get locked into that economic system like every single other group of human beings on planet earth….yeah you’ll have money, but you’ll still be a slave to the oppressor and still be colonized.

My Ancestors did not die and do all that they had to do to survive and ensure some kind of future for their descendants to have them be idiotic morons and sell out in the end just so they could drive a bloody SUV or have a bunch of white blood money to call their own.

My Ancestors did not, anyway.

Via Nehi Katawasisiw

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!