Sacred Gifts

Watch the Montel Williams Show on medical marijuana!
* To view the show in RealVideo format, go to
http://drugpolicycentral.com/real/csa/montel.rm
* To view the show in QuickTime format, go to
http://cannabiscoalition.ca/temp/montel.mov
****

Many of the Native American tribes and their supporters are beginning to boycott Columbus Day because it so inaccurately twists the authentic historical view. In researching Native American agricultural practices, one can readily understand how the importation of European practices served to destroy the land along with natural human spirituality and unity with the Universe. The attempt to institute religious practices as dictated by Judeo-Christians, as a substitute for this human spirituality as known to Native Americans, has severely damaged the human psyche.

A Columbus Day Message to Progressives

The past twenty-seven years haven't changed the conditions that led to the
necessity to create the following address, nor to the pressing need for us all
to take its message to heart. Riane Eisler's excellent archaeological research
a decade later refined some of the ancient history here, but more importantly
supported and presented evidence to the truth of this ancient wisdom that needs
to be repeated, over and over again, as the 21st century unfolds.

A Basic Call to Consciousness:
The Haudenosaunee Address to the Western World

Presented to the United Nations, Geneva, Switzerland, October 1977
Position Paper #1 -- SPIRITUALISM: The Highest Form of Political Consciousness

The "Haudenosaunee"--or Six Nations Confederacy (Iroquois)--has existed on this
land since the beginning of human memory. Our culture is among the most ancient
continuously existing cultures in the world.

We still remember the earliest doings of human beings. We remember the original
instructions of the Creators of Life on this place we call "Etenoha"--Mother
Earth. We are the spiritual guardians of this place. We are the "Ongwhehonwhe"--
the Real People.

In the beginning we were told human beings who walk about on Earth have been
provided with all things necessary for life. We were instructed to carry a love
for one another, and to show a great respect for all the beings of this Earth.
We are shown that our life exists with the tree life, that our well-being
depends on the well-being of the Vegetable Life, that we are close relatives of
the four-legged beings. In our ways, spiritual consciousness is the highest
form of politics.

Ours is a Way of Life. We believe all living things are spiritual beings.
Spirit can be expressed as energy forms manifested in matter. A blade of grass
is an energy form manifested in matter--grass matter. The spirit of grass is
that unseen force which produces the species of grass, and it is manifest to us
in the form of real grass.

All things of the world are real, material things. Creation is a true material
phenomenon, and manifests itself to us through reality. The spiritual universe,
then, is manifest to Man as Creation, the Creation which support life. We
believe that man is real, a part of Creation, and that his duty is to support
Life in conjunction with the other beings. That is why we call ourselves
Ongwhehonwhe--Real People.

The original instructions direct that we who walk about on the Earth are to
express a great respect, an affection, and a gratitude toward all the spirits
which create and support Life. We give a greeting and thanksgiving to the many
supporters of our own lives--the corn, beans, squash, the winds, the sun. When
people cease to respect and express gratitude for these many things, then all
life will be destroyed, and human life on this planet will come to an end.

Our roots are deep in the lands where we live. We have a great love for our
country, for our birthplace is there. The soil is rich from the bones of
thousands of our generations. Each of us were created in those lands, and it is
our duty to take great care of them, because from these lands will spring the
future generations of the Ongwhehonwhe. We walk about with a great respect, for
Earth is a very sacred place.

We are not a people who demand or ask anything of the Creators of Life, but
instead, we give greetings and thanksgiving that all the forces of Life are
still at work. We deeply understand our relationship to all living things. To
this day, the territories we still hold are filled with trees, animals, and the
other gifts of the Creation. In these places we still receive our nourishment
from our Mother Earth.

We have seen that not all people of Earth show the same kind of respect for
this world and its beings. The Indo-European people who have colonized our
lands have shown very little respect for the things that create and support
Life. We believe these people ceased their respect for the world a long time
ago. Many thousands of years ago, all the people of the world believed in the
same Way of Life, that of harmony with the universe. All lived according to the
Natural Ways.

Around ten thousand years ago, peoples who spoke Indo-European languages lived
in the area which today we know as the Steppes of Russia. At that time, they
were a Natural World people who lived off the land. They developed agriculture,
and it's said that they had begun the practice of animal domestication. Hunters
and gatherers who roamed the area probably acquired animals from agricultural
people, and adopted an economy based on herding and breeding animals.

Herding and breeding animals signaled a basic alteration in the relations of
humans to other life forms. It set in motion one of the true revolutions in
human history. Until herding, humans depended on Nature for the reproductive
powers of the animals. With the advent of herding, humans assumed a function
which for all time was the function of animals' spirits. Sometime after this
history records the first appearance of social organization known as
"patriarchy."

The area between Tigris and Euphrates Rivers was homeland in ancient times of
various peoples, many of whom spoke Semitic languages. Semitic people were
among the first in the world to develop irrigation technology. This led to
early development of towns, and eventually cities. Manipulation of waters,
another form of spirit life, represented another way humans developed a
technology which reproduced a function of Nature.

Within these cultures, stratified hierarchal social organization crystallized.
Ancient civilizations developed imperialism, partly because of the very nature
of cities. Cities are obviously population concentrations. Most importantly
though, they are places which must import the material needs of this
concentration from the countryside. This means that the Natural World must be
subjugated, extracted from and exploited in the interest of the city. To give
order to this process, the Semitic world developed early codes of law. They
also developed the idea of monotheism to serve as spiritual model for their
material and political organization.
Much of the history of the ancient world recounts the struggles between the
Indo-Europeans and the Semitic peoples. Over a period of several millenia, the
two cultures clashed and blended. By the second millenia B.C. some Indo-
Europeans, specifically the Greeks, adopted the practice of building cities,
thus becoming involved in the process which they named "Civilization."

Both cultures developed technologies peculiar to civilization. Semitic peoples
invented kilns to enable the creation of pottery for trade and storage of
surpluses. Early kilns eventually evolved into ovens which could generate
enough heat to smelt metals, notably copper, tin and bronze. Indo-Europeans
began smelting iron.

Rome fell heir to these two cultures, and became the place where the final
meshing occurs. Rome is also the true birthplace of Christianity. The process
that has become the culture of the West is historically and linguistically a
Semitic/Indo-European culture, but has been commonly termed the Judeo-Christian
tradition.

Christianity was an absolutely essential element in early development of this
kind of technology. Christianity advocated only one God--a religion imposed
exclusive of all others. Local people of European forests believed in the
spirits of the forest, waters, hills and land; Christianity attacked those
beliefs and effectively de-spiritualized the European world. Christian peoples,
possessing superior weaponry and a need for expansion, were able to militarily
subjugate Europe's tribal peoples.

Iron led to developing tools to cut down the forest, the source of charcoal to
make more tools. Newly cleared land was then turned by newly developed iron
plows, pulled for the first time by horses. With that technology many fewer
people would work much more land, and many other people were effectively
displaced to become soldiers and landless peasants. The rise of that technology
ushered in the Feudal Age and made possible, eventually, the rise of new cities
and growing trade. It also spelled the beginning of the end of the European
forest, although that process took a long time to complete.

The eventual rise of cities and concurrent rise of the European state created the
expansion and search for markets which led men, such as Columbus, to sail
across the Atlantic. Development of sailing vessels and navigation
technologies made the European "discovery" of the Americas inevitable.
The Americas provided Europeans a vast new area for expansion and material
exploitation. Initially, the Americas provided new and even finished materials
for the developing world economy which was based on Indo-European technologies.
European civilization has a history of rising and falling as its technologies
reach their material and cultural limits. The finite Natural world has always
provided a kind of built-in contradiction to Western expansion.

Indo-Europeans attacked every aspect of North America with unparalleled zeal.
Native people were ruthlessly destroyed because they were an unassimilable
element to the civilizations of the West. Forests provided materials for
larger ships, the land was fresh and fertile for agricultural surpluses, and
some areas provided sources of slave labor for conquering invaders. By the time
of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-Nineteenth Century, North America was
already a leader in the development of extractive technology.
Hardwood forests of the Northeast were not cleared to provide farmlands.
Those forests were destroyed to create charcoal for the forges of the iron
smelters and blacksmiths. By the 1890's, the West had turned to coal, a fossil
fuel, to provide the energy necessary for the many new forms of machinery which
had been developed. In the first half of the 20th Century, oil replaced coal as
a source of energy.

The Western culture has been horribly exploitative and destructive of the
Natural World. Over 140 species of birds and animals were utterly destroyed
since the European arrival in the Americas, largely because they were unusable
in the eyes of the invaders. The forests were leveled, the waters polluted,
Native people subjected to genocide. Vast herds of herbivores were reduced to
mere handfuls, buffalo nearly became extinct. Western technology and the people
who employed it have been the most amazingly destructive force in all of human
history. No natural disaster has ever destroyed as much. Not even the Ice Ages
counted as many victims.

But like hardwood forests, fossil fuels are also finite resources. As the
second half of the Twentieth Century has progressed, the people of the West
have begun looking to other forms of energy to motivate their technology. Their
eyes have settled on atomic energy, a form of energy production which has by-
products which are the most poisonous substances ever know to Man.

Today the species of Man is facing a question of the very survival of the
species. The way of life known as Western Civilization is on a death path on
which their own culture has no viable answers. When faced with the reality of
their own destructiveness, they can only go forward into areas of more
efficient destruction. The appearance of Plutonium on this planet is the
clearest of signals our species is in trouble. It is a signal which most
Westerners have chosen to ignore.

Air is foul, waters poisoned, trees dying, animals disappearing. We think even
the systems of weather are changing. Our ancient teaching warned us if Man
interfered with Natural Laws, these things would come to be. When the last of
the Natural Way of Life is gone, all hope for human survival will be gone with
it. And our Way of Life is fast disappearing, a victim of these destructive
processes.

The other position papers of the Haudenosaunee outline our analysis of economic
and legal oppression. But our essential message to the world is a basic call to
consciousness. Destruction of Native cultures and people is the same process
which has destroyed and is destroying life on this planet. Technologies and
social systems which have destroyed animal and plant life are also destroying
Native people. And that process is Western Civilization.

We know that there are many people in the world who can quickly grasp the
intent of our message. But experience has taught us that there are few who are
willing to seek out a method for moving toward any real change. But if there is
to be a future for all beings on this planet, we must begin to seek the avenues
of change.

Processes of colonialism and imperialism which affected the Haudenosaunee are
but a microcosm of the processes affecting the world. The system of
reservations employed against our people is a microcosm of the system of
exploitation used against the whole world. Since the time of Marco Polo, the
West has been refining a process that mystified the peoples of the Earth.

The majority of the world doesn't find its roots in Western culture or
traditions. The majority finds its roots in the Natural World--and the Natural
World, and traditions of Natural World peoples, must prevail if we are to
develop truly free, egalitarian societies.

It is necessary, at this time, that we begin a process of critical analysis of
the West's historical processes to seek out the actual nature of the roots of
the exploitative and oppressive conditions which are forced upon humanity. At
the same time, as we gain understanding of those processes, we must reinterpret
that history to the people of the world. It is the people of the West,
ultimately, who are the most oppressed and exploited. They are burdened by the
weight of centuries of racism, sexism, and ignorance which has rendered their
people insensitive to the true nature of their lives.

We must all consciously and continuously challenge every model, every program,
and every process the West tries to force upon us. Paulo Friere wrote in his
book the Pedagogy of the Oppressed that it is the nature of the oppressed to
imitate the oppressor, and by such actions try to gain relief from the
oppressive condition. We must learn to resist that response to oppression.

People living on this planet need to break with the narrow concept of human
liberation, and begin to see liberation as something which needs to be extended
to the whole Natural World. What is needed is liberation of all things that
support Life--air, water, trees--all things which support the sacred Web of Life.

We feel Native peoples of the Western Hemisphere can continue to contribute to
the survival potential of the human species. The majority of our peoples still
live in accordance with traditions which find their roots in the Mother Earth.
But Native peoples have need of a forum in which our voice can be heard. And we
need alliances with the other peoples of the world to assist in our struggle to
regain and maintain our ancestral lands and to protect the Way of Life we
follow.

We know this is very difficult. Many nation-states feel threatened by the
position. Protection and liberation of Natural World peoples and cultures is a
progressive direction which must be integrated into political strategies of
people who seek to uphold Man's dignity. But that position is growing in
strength, and represents a necessary strategy in the evolution of progressive
thought.

Traditional Native peoples hold the key to reversal of processes in Western
Civilization which hold the promise of unimaginable future suffering and
destruction. Spiritualism is the highest form of political consciousness. And
we, the Native peoples of the Western Hemisphere, are among the world's
surviving proprietors of that kind of consciousness. We're here to impart that
message.