Since personal prejudices will continue to be a battle in everyone, Daisaku Ikeda said, “It is much more valuable to look for the strength in others. You can gain nothing by criticizing their imperfections.” I am sure he was thinking of President Thomas Jefferson having had slaves. To look at our mirror image of Diasakos’s quote, I would also say, “It is much more valuable to look for and nourish our own strength, and also to recognize, so as to reverse, our imperfections[xlvi].” Recognize, not criticize. A battle within our soul. Are you eating minority-oriented propaganda produced by the Elite? Then you ARE what you eat, ‘minority’, ‘minor’, ‘less significant’. Instead align yourself to a winning power. Not ‘minority’. As an American, demand your American rights, act accordingly, and be surprised that you will get them. Recognizing what you want to be, don’t criticize what you don’t want to be.
‘Recognizing’ allow you to turn weaknesses into strength, while in criticizing you throw away the baby with the bath water. We can recognize that the Apache, Comanche, Papago, Sioux, and Iroquois had strengths and also had weaknesses, just as we do, they butchered each other, took slaves, displaced one another by force, same as the Europeans, and we would not want to emulate them on that side. Let’s recognize the strength, even those hidden in the weaknesses. We did that with the Barrio:
One: The Comanches killed on horseback. But they took better care of horses.
Two: Americans followed unfair written orders, but they recognized the value of the written word.
Three: the Iroquois Nation formed a sophisticated democratic and philosophical civilization of two hundred years alliance.”
Four: Jim Thorpe, from the Sauk and Fox tribe, in the 1910’s became one of the most accomplished all-around worldwide athletes in history. No group is more perfect than the next, no need to be so critical.
Five: A dilapidated Barrio pulled itself by the bootstraps using internal strength, heritage, adobe, and innovation.
Six: Europeans left Europe for America for a better life, making it so.
There is no way to justify the large-scale injustices perpetuated on the Native Americans during the 1860’s and 1870’s, including Trail of Tears to the Cherokees in the earlier 1830’s, and many others. Recognize it. It is notable that Anglos defined their victories as battles, while Native victories were called massacres. And the injustices and cruelties perpetrated by the Indians themselves is not a justification either. Nothing to emulate there. Today, the one valid question is what to learn so as not to engage in similar atrocities, from today on. And I raise the same question as before: what are we doing about ignoring today’s atrocities across our borders? Have we learn? The future will judge us harshly on this, as we try to judge the past. Not pretty.
Seven: A great example in recognizing strengths is, when Benjamin Franklin, in 1754, in front of the Albany Congress, made direct reference to the Iroquois model. When presenting his plan to the thirteen colonies, he took representatives from the Great Council of the Iroquois Nation to attend the meeting at the Continental Congress in 1776, twenty-two years later. Franklin introduced their democratic unifying factor into what became the all-inclusive American culture. To keep that unity a civil war was fought and won.
My conversations with Ray gave me cause to ask him an intriguing and critical question.
“If so many of the Indians considered themselves superior to the Europeans, and their fighting abilities were greater, why then did they lose and are now in reservations? What strengths did they failed to recognize?”
His response, not new, is the key to all our future, including here in the Barrio.
“The Europeans came to conquer nature and anyone who stood in their way, but not those who joined them. The Indian Tribes learned to survive in harmony with nature, and in this, they were superior, but not with respect to each other. They fought one another in cruel ways, not joining each other’s efforts or anyone’s else.” Then Ray used his previous argument against me. “Remember, and I quote myself, ‘the Iroquois drove-out from their land further to the west; the Omaha, Osage, Kaw, and Ponca tribes. The Osage fought and displaced the Caddo, and what about the Kiowa? The Cheyenne displaced the Kiowa then displaced by the Lakota, and later the Sioux often using torture to prove virility displaced Assiniboine, Crow, Shoshone and others. Not a track record to stand on for preventing their own displacement. They could not replace their losses fast enough, and never successfully united, nor were they adaptable to technology, using oral tradition different in over 500 mayor tribes. No written expertise, no common language. But this is all criticism. If they had partaken in cultural advances, adaptability, they could have developed their own technologies, not to discard rifles, gun power, cannons, locomotives, solar energy, printing, or whatever they preferred, the end would have been different. Adaptability is part of survival even in nature. A few examples; ask an Apache tribe to help build a locomotive wheel. The iron must be extracted from somewhere, refined, transported, energy to melt steel, done in factories with complicated engineering math, poured, welded, drilled, polished, assembled with all the other moving parts. Skill developed through the ages and transferred through intricate drawings and formulas. One wheel is only one small piece.
A simple thing as a six-shooter revolver, something they never could build made their arrows obsolete. The knowledge of using a surveyor, and the simple art of reading a map, available to law officers and the courts, as well as criminals, ranchers, border towns, and newspapers, was out of reach to Indians, and they were taken advantage of. Without maps, when their own intertribal verbal treaties were often unfairly broken by their own warriors, they understood that and accepted their losses.
They stood in the way of progress, a critical component of the Anglo mentality.
If they had been able to fight on equal terms, and communicate with legal documents, in a common language among them, and maybe even develop a more powerful component in their own law and technology, they would have won their war and kept the land, but they didn’t. Some were still nomads. Some had established agriculture. Many were great thinkers. Most were superb warriors, and some were diplomats, but even in safe reservations that was it! They failed to develop a common language, unity and adaptability, tradition and creativity. Without a common language, they were doomed. Misguided attempts were made to send them to schools to induce assimilation, but not to learn the ropes and let them decide how to partake, instead of imitate.”
Five hundred different Indian tribes in the continent were working at exterminating each other’s, as harmful as the extinction by the European newcomers. Europeans never really unified in Europe, but here they did, thanks to a common language which is critical. We have it. They don’t. We need to keep to one central language while also mastering others. It is crucial for a successfully functioning and unified society to have one language that unites all. The European divisiveness proves the futility of the many languages, and because of their history, such divisiveness will be difficult if at all possible to overcome. Attempts to do so will be overridden by the stronger over the weaker. Although Indians fought each other, they also made peace, intermarried, produced remarkable art (Navajos. Zunis), displayed extraordinary courage, developed survival skills and athleticism, had outstanding rich oral tradition, diplomacy, and spiritual accomplishments. With resilience, many are still facing a productive future in their own terms, without need to assimilate, only to partake. Indians have quality in their traditions that we have failed to understand or emulate - and so have many of their own. They need to share their power.
Even if all life matters, we don’t choose to be born, but after we are, everyone prefers to choose how not to die, and yet, most of the time we end up having no real choice. Quality of life is not given; it must be worked hard for. We all do, and part of it is common sense adaptability to inevitable change.
Indians, like everyone else, deserve to live a life that matters. Christians call it “love your neighbor as yourself.” Our Founding Fathers wrote “right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” You and me and them. No civilization, creed, race, or culture has had a permanent monopoly on land possession. It comes and goes. At the same time, evil triumph when good men do nothing, so blind acceptance to injustice is not an option, nor giving up to the enemy from within. However, the power is with each of us.
While it is easy for people to complain of past slavery, past treatment of Indians, cultural appropriation, and lack of social justice, and feeling elated for doing so, today we continue to avoid acknowledging that sex-slavery, drug-trafficking, and organ-harvesting coming across the border. It is so because we are the main consumers of sex and drugs, and these crimes are abundant in our society, even among our own leaders, whites, browns, yellows and blacks - including professionals and politicians, liberals and conservatives, along with many others. Great nations needs to clean their own house first. Why a demand for reparation for race but not for involuntary organ donors and families? As Alinsky may have said, “Pay them, and keep them stupid.”
So, I said, “Those who claim the Indians are victims and must be defended, are as duplicitous or emotional as I was. Only understanding the economy, working with the laws theirs and ours, keeping up with technology, and mentally embracing human equality would help them. Until then, they are the pawns of those that pretend to be helping them. I would like to also point out that there are many individual American Indians and tribal groups who have detached from this depressing yoke of minority thinking and live happy lives. We find much beauty in the American Indian world; strong family unity, love, great nurturing for their young, traditional family bonds, thriving today in safer environments than they had before. Indians are strong in characteristics, such as courage, loyalty and may have a much better developed respect for truth and personal honor, with their own moral compass.”
"To prove my point. let me point out that today many Cherokees partake and embrace a mix of both modern and traditional aspects of their culture keeping their traditions successfully. We have the Five Civilized Tribes as an organization comprised of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek), and Seminole Nations representing more than 800,000 tribal citizens throughout the United States. They seem to have accepted a process of cleaning your own house first and ready to partake with the American culture.”
Ray was a weird guy, but then maybe so was I. We agreed and disagreed simultaneously and often on the same issues, sometimes too much but having arrived at our conclusions from different angles. I treasure people who do not agree with me, or it would be boring. That way I can have interesting conversations and learn more from them, as from the kids in the Barrio. The key is not to get angry, but to listen. It is too easy to select the items that we think prove our point and ignore all others.