"Anything that's Wrong from the Beginning Can Never Be Made Right"

A Western Shoshone Elder's Quote is Timeless

I recently purchased for $5.00 a copy of Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, which is named after the Wounded Knee Massacre of Peace Chief Big Foot and his people in 1890. I first read the book in 1971 when I was sixteen years old. It would be an understatement to say I was enraged by the time I finished that book. In the chapter “War Comes to the Cheyennes,” as one example, Brown recounts some of the horror that transpired at the Sand Creek Massacre:

“Robert Bent, who was riding unwillingly with Colonel Chivington, said that when they came in sight of the [Cheyenne] camp, ‘I saw the American flag waving and heard Black Kettle tell the Indians to stand around the flag, and there they were huddled—men, women, and children This was when we were within fifty yards of the Indians. I also saw a white flag raised. ‘These flags were in so conspicuous a position that they must have been seen. . . .’ ”

“‘There seemed to be indiscriminate slaughter of men, women, and children,” Bent said, and “there were some thirty or forty” Native women “gathered down in a hole for protection.” “They sent out a little girl about six years old with a white flag on a stick; she had not proceeded but a few steps when she was shot and killed.” Bent recounted that the Native women offered no resistance. “Every one I saw dead was scalped,” he recounted.

Dee Brown said that “Robert Bent’s description of the soldiers’ atrocities was corroborated by Lieutenant James Conner: ‘In going over the battleground the next day,” Conner stated, “I did not see a body of man, woman, or child but was scalped, and in many instances their bodies were mutilated in the most horrible manner—men, women, and children’s privates cut out, &c . . .’”

What you’re reading about in the above few paragraphs describing a horrific massacre is domination. Think of the desperation that those Cheyenne people felt, huddled together, thinking that perhaps the marauders would not murder a defenseless six-year child holding a white flag used to symbolize surrender. They were mistaken.

Every word of the above account describes acts of domination by Colonel Chivington and his men, and the entire book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is really focused on domination, but not by that name. In fact, as I look the book over today, I see that it’s unlikely that the word “domination” appears even one time in Brown’s book.

Now think of everywhere on earth where these kinds of atrocities have been committed in the past and are being committed in the present by perpetrators who maintain deadly systems and behavioral patterns of domination. The decision to commit such acts were willfully made, but they didn’t need to be. It was just as possible for the perpetrators to decide to not commit such heinous acts against any age group (even fetuses and infants used for target practice).

Unfortunately, a paradigm of domination had control of the brain of every perpetrator. This resulted in such brutality with no apparent conscience or remorse.

Above, we see just a few paragraphs from four-hundred-and-seventy-pages (when we include Brown’s sources) from an entire book which provides a tiny fraction of the detailed accounts of bloody efforts over the course of centuries to annihilate and dominate the original nations and peoples of this continent.

People who are ignorant of this record, or who choose to ignore it, are the ones who talk about “this great country,” and making America “great again.”

What I didn’t know when I read Dee Brown’s book as a teenager in 1971, is that I was reading about the ruinous effects of what I now call “the domination system.” I don’t recall ever seeing or learning about that theme in any of my readings. It was not a focus of my professors at the University of Oregon. It was not a focus of Native authors.

Instead, Native authors such as Vine Deloris, Jr., and those of us aspiring to become Native authors, placed emphasis on the theme of “discovery.” And as I think back now, I realize that the focus on “discovery” was placing our attention in the wrong direction. “Discovery” was never the central problem or issue.

The more important issue has always been the way in which the Christian Europeans implicitly claimed to possess a right of domination [called “civilization”] over non-Christian nations and peoples, and over their lands and territories. The Christian Europeans acted upon that claim by forcing other nations and peoples to live under and subject to their system of domination, a system that is still ongoing perpetually, or, in the words of Pope Alexander VI, in “en perpetua” (“forever” or “eternally” in English).

The Indian reservations of today are an outcome of that system, but so is the entire contemporary world order across the globe. In my view, the Vatican papal bulls of the fifteenth century are the blueprint for the current global system of domination, including the states of domination of the planet, the predator corporations, and, arguably, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Economic Forum (WEF), etc.

As the Descendants of the Free Nations and Peoples of this Turtle Island Continent (“North America”), We Have a Fundamental Right to Resist Every Claim of a Right of Domination Made Against Us From Whatever Source

Think of an entire people that has been living for thousands of years, free and independent of a foreign linguistic and behavioral system of domination, which, unknown to them, exists far away across an entire ocean.

Suppose the people who maintain that distant system of domination manage to eventually send representative agents by ship across that immense body of water. And suppose that when they arrive the invaders perform rituals based on the idea that their unseen “God” has given them (we have to take their word for it) the right to claim a right of domination over and on top of the free nations and peoples already existing there on that land, and over and on top of their descendants, forever.

Based on the idea that a free people have the right to remain free from any claim of a right of domination made by some foreign nation or people, it stands to reason that the free nation or people, and their descendants, will never be rightfully obligated to submit themselves to the foreign claim of a right of domination.

However, because the free nation or people initially cannot speak the language of the people invading them, at first they will not know how to express this argument to the invaders in the invaders’ own language. And once they have learned the invaders’ language it is also possible that because generations have passed, it might never occur to them to make such an argument.

We are the ones who now need to make this case to the world community based on our original free existence as nations and peoples.

And if the descendants of the overseas immigrant dominators manage to coerce a free nation or people to live under and subject to their foreign system of domination, will the invaders ever be able to sensibly claim that the resulting outcome is a “democracy,” or a quote- unquote “free and democratic” society?

Here are some additional questions: Does a society, state of domination, or empire, that robs free nations and peoples of their liberty deserve to be called a “free society,” except in the most dominating sense, i.e., the empire is “free” but not the peoples being subjected by the empire?

Does a claim of a right of domination, arbitrarily made against a free nation or people, ever become valid from the viewpoint of the ones being dominated? What if over time the dominated appear to acquiesce because they don’t know how to challenge the claim of a right of domination because they don’t even see that claim? Regardless, the claim itself is remains a bogus mental and linguistic fabrication?

Does the mere passage of time make the claim of a right of domination valid? If so, on what basis does an argument which is invalid suddenly and magically become regarded as valid?

If the foreign nation or people and their descendants claim to possess a God-given right to impose their domination on the free nation or people, and if they even have the Bible to “prove it,” will they actually possess such a right of domination from the perspective of those who have been invaded and dominated?

What, if anything, would make the claim of a right of domination valid, especially when overseas foreigners and their descendants, make such a claim against free peoples? How about “conquest”? How about, “We won, you lost, now get over it”? How about “heads I win, tails you lose”? How about the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1823 candidly admitted formula of pretending to mentally convert the “discovery” of an already inhabited country into “conquest”?

What’s a powerful response by our original nations and peoples to all this nonsense? How about “Anything that’s wrong from the beginning can never be made right,” as stated by Western Shoshone elder Glenn Wasson, may he rest in peace.

Steven Newcomb