Making Domination “Great” (Again?)
An Original Nations' View-from-the-Shore
Three Photos by Steven Newcomb taken at the Sand Creek Massacre Exhibit (History Colorado Center, in Denver, Colorado).
We as Native people are the descendants of the original and free nations and peoples of this Turtle Island continent (“North America”). Our part of the planet was an exceedingly Old World when it was invaded more than five centuries ago by peoples from western christendom (i.e., western europe).
During the centuries leading up to the “birth” of what George Washington called a “rising empire,” our Native nations went from living a free and independent way of life on our own lands, on our own terms, with our own spiritual and ceremonial traditions, to living under and subject to the claim of a right of domination made mentally, verbally, and in written form by people who called themselves “Christian” “European,” and, eventually, “American.”
One of the ways the US government enforced its assumed right of domination was by forcing Native children into their church and government run so-called “boarding schools.” In October of 1881, US Indian Commissioner of Indian Affairs Hiram Price, in his annual report to Congress stated: “Savage [free and independent Native life] and civilized life cannot live and prosper on the same ground. One of the two must die.”
Raphael Lemkin defined “genocide” as the intention to destroy, in whole or in part, an entire nation of people. A genocidal process can be carried out by an imperial country attempting to make itself “great” by capturing the children of free Native nations and subjecting them to mental and physical indoctrination and preventing the children, during their most formative years, from learning their own language, culture, oral history, ceremonial traditions, as well as forms of intelligence, knowledge, and wisdom that took thousands of years to develop.
According to the dominators’ view-from-the-ship perspective our natural free existence as Nations and Peoples had to be killed off just like the buffalo nation had to be killed off to destroy the independent economies of Native nations on the Great Plains, and impose the dominators’ system of domination across the continent.
People like Indian Commissioner Price, and other policy makers who made it their business to rationalize domination, applied to our nations and peoples the opposite logic that they applied to the wealthiest sector of the society. When it came to the wealthy, the rule was, “The many must yield to the few.” When it came to the treatment of our original nations and peoples, however, their rule conveniently flipped: “The few must yield to the many.”
Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, 1890 (californiaindianeducation.org)
The political and economic system which ended up being called “America” transitioned from thirteen British colonies along the Atlantic seaboard to thirteen self-declared confederated “States.” This was the outcome of invading western european peoples having arrived by ship to the shores of Turtle Island. The invaders came ashore with a specific intention. The same deadly, general intention was universally held by the invaders from western christendom, despite their linguistic and cultural differences.
However, the invaders did not clearly and openly state their intention in the manner that I’m now expressing it in English. By this I mean that, with notable exceptions, western intellectuals have not applied the word “domination” to the motivations and actions of their own societies. Dominion and dominance perhaps, but not the word “domination.” Perhaps this is why the intention I am now explaining has gone unnoticed by that name.
The decades I’ve spent researching the mental and cultural worlds of the colonizers has enabled me to see that, from the beginning, the most elite sectors of what they labeled “christian” and “european” societies intended to impose a claim of a right of domination on everyone and everything on this continent. I’ve spent most of a lifetime studying the horrific effects that the claim of a right of domination has had on our original nations and peoples, on all peoples, and on Life itself.
In The Pentagon of Power (1970), the eminent thinker Lewis Mumford titled his first chapter “New Explorations, New Worlds.”
He identifies “two complementary kinds of exploration” that he says have “beckoned Western man.” We can think of Elon Musk gazing longingly toward Mars when reading Mumford’s statement, “If the bright starry heavens invited exploration, so did the dark continents across the seas; and so eventually did the still darker continent of man’s cultural and biological past.”
That drive to explore, discover, and exploit a cultural and biological past was also focused on the future. Now, centuries later, we can clearly see that that drive has resulted in present-day efforts to corporatize all Life and to convert all aspects of Life into data-driven profit. This includes the molecular and genetic realms. The masters of the system of domination have also extended their mastery by means of, e.g., gain-of-function bioweaponry, vaccinology, and the petroceutical-chemical industry.
In Mumford’s view, western man’s drive to explore was of two varieties, which, he says, “merged into a single movement.” Western man has wanted to reduce the bountiful “gifts of nature” down to “a single aspect,” says Mumford. And that single aspect was whatever could be, as he put it, “brought under human domination.” Mumford further states, using the Chosen People-Promised Land Model:
“One exploration focused mainly on the sky and on the orderly motions of planets and falling bodies, on space-measuring and timekeeping, on repetitive events and determinable laws. The other boldly traversed the seas and even burrowed below the surface of the earth, seeking the Promised Land [using a biblical analogy of ‘God’s’ covenant with the Hebrews]. . . Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, the New World opened by terrestrial explorers, adventurers, soldiers, and administrators joined forces with the scientific and technical new world that the scientists, the inventors, and the engineers explored and cultivated [colonized].”
“When the active period of discovery and colonization was over,” he continues, “and the promised land still lay below the horizon, much of the original faith and fervor was transferred from the exploitation of the indigenous ‘New World’ to that [the world] of the machine.”
These two approaches were extended over massive geographical areas that they intended to force under a regime of domination; one approach was, he says, “aimed at natural resources to be discovered and appropriated.” The other was focused on “mechanical power and artificial wealth.”
The two approaches had, in his view, “never from the beginning been far apart.” The Artificial Intelligence Era now being manifested, is also a pathway for the Investor Class to accumulate what Mumford term “artificial wealth,” for example, digital crypto currency, with totalitarian forms of digital identification on the horizon. The knot is being pulled ever tighter.
The massive trajectory of genocide committed against our original nations and peoples, and other peoples, has resulted in the poisoning of pristine waters, the destruction of old growth forests, and the ruination of extraordinary and breathtaking ecological systems nurtured by our ancestors. This is the unnoticed consequence and backdrop of the meme “Make America Great Again” by maintaining and expanding a political and economic domination.
Ame, a Latin command for “love!” and Rica, a Latin term for “riches and wealth,” yields “Make the Love of Riches and Wealth Great Again.” And by what means are those riches and wealth to be obtained? Mr. Musk put it succinctly: a corporate duty to shareholders to maximize profits, “no matter how ruthlessly.” Ruthless is accurately thought of as meaning, without pity or compassion, without conscience or remorse for the harms and injuries inflicted on peoples and the planet.
Innumerable books chronicle the ruthlessness that was applied to our original nations and peoples in pursuit of making the American Dream of Riches and Wealth “great.” The list includes such books as Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee (1970), by Dee Brown; American Holocaust (1992) by David Stannard; Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil , by Gerald Colby and Charlotte Dennett (1995); Missionaries: God Against the Indians (1990), by Norman Lewis; Domesticate or Exterminate (1975), by Chad Hoopes; An American Genocide (2016), by Benjamin Madley; and Suffer the Little Children: Genocide, Indigenous Nations, and the Canadian State (2018), by Tamara Starblanket. The list of sources is voluminous.
The cultish chant “USA, USA, USA” strikes me as symptomatic of a people who have reached a phase of intense psychological insecurity. The chant seems to be an effort to infuse renewed belief and energy into the political experiment called “the American way of life.” A twenty-year-old Reuters news story may help illustrate some of the costs of the American political and economic experiment to which the adjective “great” is being so enthusiastically applied.
On July 24, 2005, a story written by Maggie Fox and released by Reuters states: “Unborn babies are soaking in a stew of chemicals, including mercury, gasoline byproducts and pesticides. . . The report by the Environmental Working Group is based on tests of 10 samples of umbilical cord blood taken by the American Red Cross.”
They found an average of 287 contaminants in the blood, including mercury, fire retardants, pesticides, and the Teflon chemical PFOA. “Of the 287 chemicals we detected in the umbilical cord blood,” says the report, “we know that 180 cause cancer in humans or animals, 217 are toxic to the brain and nervous system, and 208 cause birth defects or abnormal development in animal tests.”
We as the descendants of the original nations and peoples of the planet have experienced a trajectory of imposed domination, death, scarcity, and destruction. Those negative terms are now accurately applied to the society of the United States; they are accurately applied worldwide. Yet they are obfuscated by such terms as, “civilization,” “manifest destiny,” “progress,” “economic development,” “GDP,” and so forth.
When we look at what is revealed in The Pfizer Papers: Pfizer’s Crimes Against Humanity (2024), edited by Naomi Wolf and Amy Kelly, it appears that the system of domination has those who are chanting and those who ardently oppose them, as well as homo sapiens in general across the planet in its crosshairs. How so? By attempting to provide them with an early exit off the planet. Highly alarming statistics are available for those who care to look.
The Pfizer Papers contains CV-19 mRNA injection testing information that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) asked a U.S. court to keep hidden for seventy-five years, which is longer than the secrecy surrounding circumstances of the JFK assassination. A courageous judge refused to honor the FDA’s request by instead ordering the timely release of some 450,000 Pfizer documents. 3250 volunteers helped comb through that information. Deeply disturbing data contained in those documents became the basis for The Pfizer Papers.
“Prey Naïvete” is a phrase intended to label what happens when prey remain naïve to the ways of their predators. The phrase seems apt for what has been and is still currently happening because of the assertion of America’s “great” claim of a right of domination on this beautiful planet, we call Mother Earth.
Thanks for the comprehensive analysis! Very important to understand that it's not simply one society dominating another, but that the dominating society is itself structured by domination....
Great work putting the current domination narrative in context. Thank you for sharing!